Optimal Multi-View Surface Normal Estimation Using Affine Correspondences

An optimal, in the least squares sense, method is proposed to estimate surface normals in both stereo and multi-view cases. The proposed algorithm exploits exclusively photometric information via affine correspondences and estimates the normal for each correspondence independently. The normal is obtained as a root of a quartic polynomial. Therefore, the processing time is negligible. Eliminating the outliers, we propose a robust extension of the algorithm that combines maximum likelihood estimation and iteratively re-weighted least squares. The method has been validated on both synthetic and publicly available real-world datasets. It is superior to the state of the art in terms of accuracy and processing time. Besides, we demonstrate two possible applications: 1) using our algorithm as the seed-point generation step of patch-based multi-view stereo method, the obtained reconstruction is more accurate, and the error of the 3D points is reduced by 30% on average and 2) multi-plane fitting becomes more accurate applied to the resulting oriented point cloud.