Specularity and shadow detection for the multisource photometric reconstruction of a textured surface

Textured surface analysis is essential for many applications. In this paper, we present a three-dimensional (3D) recovery approach for real textured surfaces based on photometric stereo. The aim is to be able to reconstruct the textured surfaces in 3D with a high degree of accuracy. For this, the proposed method uses a sequence of six images and a Lambertian bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) to recover the surface height map. A hierarchical selection of these images is employed to eliminate the effects of shadows and highlights for all surface facets. To evaluate the performances of our method, we compare it to other traditional photometric stereo methods on real textured surfaces using six or more images.