English

Fast and Accurate Surface Normal Integration on Non-Rectangular Domains

Numerical Analysis 2016-10-20 v1 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Abstract

The integration of surface normals for the purpose of computing the shape of a surface in 3D space is a classic problem in computer vision. However, even nowadays it is still a challenging task to devise a method that combines the flexibility to work on non-trivial computational domains with high accuracy, robustness and computational efficiency. By uniting a classic approach for surface normal integration with modern computational techniques we construct a solver that fulfils these requirements. Building upon the Poisson integration model we propose to use an iterative Krylov subspace solver as a core step in tackling the task. While such a method can be very efficient, it may only show its full potential when combined with a suitable numerical preconditioning and a problem-specific initialisation. We perform a thorough numerical study in order to identify an appropriate preconditioner for our purpose. To address the issue of a suitable initialisation we propose to compute this initial state via a recently developed fast marching integrator. Detailed numerical experiments illuminate the benefits of this novel combination. In addition, we show on real-world photometric stereo datasets that the developed numerical framework is flexible enough to tackle modern computer vision applications.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1610.06049,
  title  = {Fast and Accurate Surface Normal Integration on Non-Rectangular Domains},
  author = {Martin Bähr and Michael Breuß and Yvain Quéau and Ali Sharifi Boroujerdi and Jean-Denis Durou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1610.06049},
  year   = {2016}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T16:25:28.046Z