Reconstruction of non-Lambertian surfaces by fusion of Shape from Shading and active range scanning

In this paper, we present an algorithm for the fusion of surface normals estimated based on Shape from Shading with absolute depth data under exploitation of the mutual advantages, regarding non-Lambertian surfaces with non-uniform albedos. While photometric 3D reconstruction methods yield dense surface detail information which is reliable on small scales, active range scanning provides absolute depth data which are typically noisy on small scales but reliable on large scales. The proposed algorithm applies an iterative refinement to the reconstructed surface in order to suppress errors that result from measurement uncertainties in the surface normals and the absolute depth data by simultaneous minimization of a global error functional. The obtained surface is the best fit to the observed image intensities and depth data. We apply our framework to small-scale real-world objects and to regions of the lunar surface.