Abstract This paper presents a photometric stereo method that works with unknown natural illuminations without any cal-ibration object To solve this challenging problem, we pro-pose the use of an equivalent directional lighting model for small surface patches consisting of slowly varing normals,and solve each patch up to an arbitrary rotation ambiguity.Our method connects the resulting patches and unifies the local ambiguities to a global rotation one through angular distance propagation defined over the whole surface.Af-ter applying the integrabilitty constraint,our final solution contains only a binary ambiguity,which could be easily re-moved. Experiments using both synthetic and real-world datasets show our method provides even comparable results to calibrated methods.