Robust albedo estimation from a facial image with cast shadow

Albedo estimation from a facial image is crucial for various computer vision tasks such as 3D morphable model fitting, shape recovery and illumination-invariant face recognition, but it has not been addressed well. This paper describes how albedo can be estimated from the combined use of image in tensity and facial depth information even if the image is under general,unknown light with cast shadow. In order to estimate the albedo map, we formulate the albedo estimation problem as a linear programming using 1-norm under the assumption that the surface of a face has a constant albedo. The proposed method is simple and the experiment results show that the proposed approach gives better albedo estimation than other methods.