Joint blind restoration and surface recovery in photometric stereo

Abstract

We address the problem of simultaneous estimation of scene structure and restoration of images from blurred photometric measurements. In photometric stereo, the structure of an object is determined by using a particular reflectance model (the image irradiance equation) without considering the blurring effect. What we show is that, given arbitrarily blurred observations of a static scene captured with a stationary camera under different illuminant directions, we still can obtain the structure represented by the surface gradients and the albedo and also perform a blind image restoration. The surface gradients and the albedo are modeled as separate Markov random fields, and a suitable regularization scheme is used to estimate the different fields as well as the blur parameter. The results of the experimentations are illustrated with real as well as synthetic images.