A Direct Method of Shape from Shading

In this paper, we present a method for directly computing the surface gradient of each pixel for 3D vision information computation on the basis of shape from shading. In our method, we estimate the unknown surface gradient of a current pixel, using the known surface gradients of its neighbor pixels, and then through several rounds of boundary tracking, we traverse all points and compute their surface gradients. Our method is faster, since each operation is purely local and direct. Besides, by adjusting a control parameter, i.e. iteration accuracy, it can give more precise depth map for a synthetic image.