FSAM: A fast self-adaptive method for correcting non-uniform illumination for 3D reconstruction

Since three-dimensional surface texture can display texture information of an object better than its two-dimensional counterpart and can vary with scene illumination and the view angles, it is widely used in virtual reality, computer games and animation applications. Photometric Stereo, as one of the most effective technologies for capturing three-dimensional surface information, has attracted wide attention both from academic researchers and industrial fields. Uniform illumination is the essential condition for capturing and reconstructing surface heightmaps. In practice, non-uniform illumination leads to distorted surface heightmaps, such as distortion and aberration during the capture and reconstruction processes. This paper proposes and assesses a fast and self-adaptive method based on inverse-square law to correct non-uniform illumination for reconstruction of 3D surface heightmaps, and to eliminate the distortions. In order to objectively assess the performance of the illumination correction algorithm, average absolute gradient (AAG) is proposed to compare the surface heightmaps reconstructed using corrected illumination with those reconstructed without illumination correction. Experimental results show that the method is efficient and can produce convincing results.