Polarimetric Helmholtz Stereopsis

Helmholtz stereopsis (HS) exploits the reciprocity principle of light propagation (i.e., the Helmholtz reciprocity) for 3D reconstruction of surfaces with arbitrary reflectance. In this paper, we present the polarimetric Helmholtz stereopsis (polar-HS), which extends the classical HS by considering the polarization state of light in the reciprocal paths. With the additional phase information from polarization, polar-HS requires only one reciprocal image pair. We formulate new reciprocity and diffuse/specular polarimetric constraints to recover surface depths and normals using an optimization framework. Using a hardware prototype, we show that our approach produces high-quality 3D reconstruction for different types of surfaces, ranging from diffuse to highly specular.