Surface-from-Gradients: An Approach Based on Discrete Geometry Processing

Wuyuan Xie, Yunbo Zhang, Charlie C. L. Wang, and Ronald C.-K. Chung

Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Fig.1: This figure illustrates the overview of our proposed local-global discrete geometry processing.


Abstract
In this paper, we propose an efficient method to reconstruct surface-from-gradients (SfG). Our method is formulated under the framework of discrete geometry processing. Unlike the existing SfG approaches, we transfer the ontinuous reconstruction problem into a discrete space and efficiently solve the problem via a sequence of least-square optimization steps. Our discrete formulation brings three advantages:1) the reconstruction preserves sharp-features, 2) sparse/incomplete set of gradients can be well handled, and 3) domains of computation can have irregular boundaries. Our formulation is direct and easy to implement, and the comparisons with state-of-the-arts show the effectiveness of our method.
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Application
Our efficient surface-from-gradients (SfG) reconstruction method mainly serves for shape from shading [1] and photometric stereo [2]. Shape from shading and photometric stereo methods can estimate a dense but noisy gradient field, which is used to calculate the height field by integration [3,4] whose outputs are over-smooth and distorted. In our framework, we avoid by using a discrete setup: Each pixel is regarded as a square facet and corresponding to a sample in the gradient field, then a two-step discrete geometry processing (DGP) method is iteratively conducted as: First, deform the overall mesh (consisting of pixel facets) to let each facet follow the demanded normal vectors (we call this step as local shaping), and then a global blending step is applied to glue all the facets back into a connected mesh surface (see Figure 1). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach formulating the SfG problem in DGP, and it is fast and efficient (in most case, it only takes two steps to converge to a satisfied solution). Our main advantages can be concluded as three-fold:

1. Sharp-feature Preservation: As the normal vectors are only enforced inside facets in the local shaping step, sharp-features can be formed along the boundary of facets. Meanwhile, the surface smoothness is preserved by the least-square optimization in the global blending step.

Fig.2: As the normal vectors are only enforced inside facets in the local shaping step, sharp-features can be formed along the boundary of facets. Meanwhile, the surface smoothness is preserved by the least-square optimization in the global blending step.

2. Incomplete Data: The formulate of our DGP-base SfG approach can be applied to incomplete data sets, in which the gradients on some pixels are not known. Examples with up to 55% information missed can be successfully reconstructed.

Fig.3: Tests of our approach on inputs with different amount of noises added: (a) Color maps illustrate the distribution of noises and colors denote the amount of perturbation in terms of angle degree. (b) When treating all noisy samples as inliers, the computation of our approach converges in 5 steps. (c) When considering the noisy samples as outliers and removing them from the computation - that leads to an input with sparse samples, our approach can successfully converge to a reconstruction with more higher quality in 18, 38, 143 and 195 steps of iteration respectively..

3. Irregular Domain Boundary: Benefit from transforming the computing media to a mesh surface, the reconstruction of surfaces with boundaries in general shapes can be easily supported by our approach.


Quantitative Comparison

Fig.4: In total, we test 20 models and compare the results generated from eight different algorithms, including ours, Poisson [4], alphasurface [5], M-estimator [6], regularization [7], anisotropic diffusion [8] and kernel-based fitting [9, 10]. The averages of relative errors are measured on all the results to obtain a quantitative comparison. Both the noise-free input (top-left) and the input with Gaussian noises (top-right) are tested. Our approach outperforms other methods in both cases.


References
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[2] R.J. Woodham, "Photometric method for determining surface orientation from multiple images", Optical engineering, 19(1):139-144, 1980.
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[5] A. Agrawal, R. Raskar, and R. Chellappa, "What is the range of surface reconstructions froma gradient field?", In European Conference Computer Vision (ECCV), 2006, pages 578-591. Springer, 2006.
[6] P. Charbonnier, L. Blanc-Feraud, G. Aubert, and M. Barlaud, "Deterministic edge-preserving regularization in computed imaging", IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 6(2):298-311, 1997.
[7] G. Aubert and P. Kornprobst, Mathematical Problems in Image Processing: Partial Differential Equations and the Calculus of Variations (Applied Mathematical Sciences). Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., 2006.
[8] P. Perona and J.Malik, "Scale-space and edge detection using anisotropic diffusion", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 12(7):629-639, 1990.
[9] H.S. Ng, T.P. Wu, and C.K. Tang, "Surface-from-gradients without discrete integrability enforcement: A gaussian kernel approach", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 32(11):2085-2099, 2010.
[10] T.P. Wu. Source code of "surface-from-gradients without discrete integrability enforcement: A gaussian kernel approach", http://www.cse.ust.hk/~pang/.