Multi-View Stereo Reconstruction of Dense Shape and Complex Appearance

We address the problem of estimating the three-dimensional shape and complex appearance of a scene from a calibrated set of views under fixed illumination. Our approach relies on a rank condition that must be satisfied when the scene exhibits “specular + diffuse” reflectance characteristics. This constraint is used to define a cost functional for the discrepancy between the measured images and those generated by the estimate of the scene, rather than attempting to match image-to-image directly. Minimizing such a functional yields the optimal estimate of the shape of the scene, represented by a dense surface, as well as its radiance, represented by four functions defined on such a surface. These can be used to generate novel views that capture the non-Lambertian appearance of the scene.