Detecting and Removing Specular Reflectance Components Based on Image Linearization

Shape from Shading and Photometric Stereo are famous approaches to recover the 3D shape from image(s). These approaches can obtain 3D shape from observed gray scale image(s) but it is necessary to estimate reflectance parameters for objects when some specular reflectance components are observed. Specular reflectance is difficult to be handled as diffuse reflectance in general. It is expected to remove specular reflectance component without assuming any kind of reflectance function (reflectance model). This paper proposes a method to remove specular reflection components using 4 observed images taken under 4 different light source directions using relighting approach of diffused reflectance based on image linearization. Results are demonstrated via computer simulation and experiments.