Abstract

This paper presents a photometric stereo method that works for optically thick translucent ob jects exhibiting subsurface scattering. Our method is built upon the previous studies showing that subsur- face scattering is approximated as convolution with a blurring kernel. We extend this observation and show that the original surface normal convolved with the scattering kernel corresponds to the blurred surface normal that can be obtained by a conventional photometric stereo tech- nique. Based on this observation, we cast the photometric stereo problem for optically thick translucent ob jects as a deconvolution problem, and develop a method to recover accurate surface normals. Experimental re- sults of both synthetic and real-world scenes show the effectiveness of the proposed method.