Shape-from-shading using a curvature consistency constraint

This paper makes two contributions to the problem of needle-map recovery using shape-from-shading. Firstly, we provide a geometric update procedure which allows the image irradiance equation to be satisfied as a hard constraint. This improves the data-closeness of the recovered needle-map. Secondly, we consider how topographic constraints can be used to impose local consistency on the recovered needle-map. We present a curvature consistency model, and provide an experimental assessment of the new SFS framework on both real-world images and synthetic images with known ground-truth surface-normals