Fast 3D Shape Recovery from Shadows Projected on Arbitrary Curved Surfaces

Abstract

The shadow based 3D surface reconstruction methods usually assume that shadows are projected on planar surfaces. However, shadows are often projected on curved surfaces in the real scene. Recently, the shadow graph has been proposed for representing shadow information efficiently, and for recovering 3D shapes from shadows projected on curved surfaces. Unfortunately, the method requires a large computational cost and is weak to the image intensity noises. In this paper, we introduce 1D shadow graphs which can represent shadow information quite efficiently, and can be used for recovering 3D shapes with much smaller computational costs than before. We also extend our method, so that we can recover 3D shape quite accurately by using shading information as well as shadow information. The proposed method is tested by using the real and synthetic images.