Simultaneous Localization and Appearance Estimation with a Consumer RGB-D Camera

Acquiring general material appearance with hand-held consumer RGB-D cameras is difficult for casual users, due to the inaccuracy in reconstructed camera poses and geometry, as well as the unknown lighting that is coupled with materials in measured color images. To tackle these challenges, we present a novel technique for estimating the spatially varying isotropic surface reflectance, solely from color and depth images captured with an RGB-D camera under unknown environment illumination. The core of our approach is a joint optimization, which alternates among solving for plausible camera poses, materials, the environment lighting and normals. To refine camera poses, we exploit the rich spatial and view-dependent variations of materials, treating the object as a localization-self-calibrating model. To recover the unknown lighting, measured color images along with the current estimate of materials are used in a global optimization, efficiently solved by exploiting the sparsity in the wavelet domain. We demonstrate the substantially improved quality of estimated appearance on a variety of daily objects.