Shape from photomotion

A new technique called shape from photomotion is introduced. It uses a series of 2-D Lambertian images, generated by moving a light source around a scene, to recover the depth map. In each of the images, the object in the scene remains at a fixed position and the only variable is the light source direction. The movement of the light source causes a change in the intensity of any given point in the image. The change in intensity is what enables recovery of the unknown parameter, the depth map, since it remains constant in each of the input images. The authors´ method differs from photometric stereo in the sense that the shape estimate is not only computed for each light source orientation, but also gradually refined by photomotion