Compensation for inter-reflection and control of reflection coefficient for directional diffuse object in photometric stereo

In photometric stereo two of the common problems are inter-reflections and non-Lambertian reflection. The former locally blurs the images, resulting in a locally distorted shape, where the effects may be more significant as the object structure is more complicated. The latter, on the other hand, gives global distortions and it may be represented by directional diffuse reflection. In this paper, we present an image processing method to reduce the effects of inter-reflections for directional diffuse reflection object. The method is described mathematically, and experimental results are given to examine the method.