Shape from texture

A central goal for visual perception is the recovery of the three-dimensional structure of the surfaces depicted in an image. Crucial information about three-dimensional structure is provided by the spatial distribution of surface markings, particularly for static monocular views: projection distorts texture geometry in a manner tha depends systematically on surface shape and orientation. To isolate and measure this projective distortion in an image is to recover the three dimensional structure of the textured surface. For natural textures, we show that the uniform density assumption (texels are uniformly distributed) is enough to recover the orientation of a single textured plane in view, under perspective projection. Furthermore, when the texels cannot be found, the edges of the image are enough to determine shape, under a more general assumption, that the sum of the lengths of the contours on the world plane is about the same everywhere. Finally, several experimental results for synthetic and natural images are presented.