Abstract

One of the problems that hinders the application of conven- tional methods for shape-from-shading to the analysis of shiny ob jects is the presence of local highlights. The first of these are specularities which appear at locations on the viewed ob ject where the local surface normal is the bisector of the light source and viewing directions. High- lights also occur at the occluding limb of the ob ject where roughness results in backscattering from microfacets which protrude above the sur- face. In this paper, we consider how to subtract both types of highlight from shiny surfaces in order to improve the quality of surface normal information recoverable using shape-from-shading.