Recovering Reflectance and Illumination in a World of Painted Polyhedra

Pawan Sinha and Edward Adelson

Published in
Fourth International Conference on Computer Vision (pp. 156-163)
Berlin; May 11-14 (1993)

To be immune to variations in illumination, a vision system needs to be able to decompose images into their illumination and surface reflectance components. Although this problem is greatly underconstrained, the human visual system is able to solve it in diverse situations. Most computational studies thus far have been concerned with strategies for solving the problem in the restricted domain of 2-D Mondrians. This domain has the simplifying characteristic of permitting discontinuities only in the reflectance distribution while the illumination distribution is constrained to vary smoothly. Such approaches prove inadequate in a 3-D world of painted polyhedra which allows for the existence of discontinuities in both the reflectance and illumination distributions. We propose a two-stage computational strategy for interpreting images acquired in such a domain.