Abstract Images captured in participating media such as murky water, fog, or smoke are degraded by scattered light. Thus, the use of traditional three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction techniques in such environments is difficult. In this paper, we propose a photometric stereo method for participating media. The proposed method differs from previous studies with respect to modeling shape-dependent forward scatter. In the proposed model, forward scatter is described as an analytical form using lookup tables and is represented by spatially-variant kernels. We also propose an approximation of a large-scale dense matrix as a sparse matrix, which enables the removal of forward scatter. Experiments with real and synthesized data demonstrate that the proposed method improves 3D reconstruction in participating media