Recovering surface shape and orientation from texture

摘要

Texture provides an important source of information about the three-dimensional structure of visible surfaces, particularly for stationary monocular views. To recover 3d structure, the distorting effects of projection must be distinguished from properties of the texture on which the distortion acts. This requires that assumptions must be made about the texture, yet the unpredictability of natural textures precludes the use of highly restrictive assumptions. The recovery method reported in this paper exploits the minimal assumption that textures do not mimic projective effects. This assumption determines the strategy of attributing as much as possible of the variation observed in the image to projection. Equivalently, the interpretation is chosen for which the texture, prior to projection, is made as uniform as possible. This strategy was implemented using statistical methods, first for the restricted case of planar surfaces and then, by extension, for curved surfaces. The technique was applied successfully to natural images.