Single-Shot Reflectance Measurement from Polarized Color Gradient Illumination

We present a method for acquiring the per-pixel diffuse albedo, specular albedo, and surface normal maps of a subject at a single instant in time. The method is single-shot, requiring no optical flow, and per-pixel, making no assumptions regarding albedo statistics or surface connectivity. We photograph the subject inside a spherical illumination device emitting a static lighting pattern of vertically polarized RGB color gradients aligned with the XYZ axes, and horizontally polarized RGB color gradients inversely aligned with the XYZ axes. We capture simultaneous photographs using one of two possible setups: a single-view setup using a coaxially aligned camera pair with a polarizing beam splitter, and a multi-view stereo setup with different orientations of linear polarizing filters placed on the cameras, enabling high-quality geometry reconstruction. From this lighting we derive full-color diffuse albedo, single-channel specular albedo suitable for dielectric materials, and polarization-preserving surface normals which are free of corruption from subsurface scattering. We provide simple formulae to estimate the diffuse albedo, specular albedo, and surface normal maps in the single-view and multi-view cases and show error bounds which are smallfor many common subjects including faces.