Geometry Meets Light: Leveraging Geometric Priors for Universal Photometric Stereo Under Limited Multi-Illumination Cues

Abstract Universal Photometric Stereo is a promising approach for recovering surface normals without strict lighting assumptions. However, it struggles when multi-illumination cues are unreliable, such as under biased lighting or in shadows or self-occluded regions of complex in-the-wild scenes. We propose GeoUniPS, a universal photometric stereo network that integrates synthetic supervision with high-level geometric priors from large-scale 3D reconstruction models pretrained on massive in-the-wild data. Our key insight is that these 3D reconstruction models serve as visual-geometry foundation models, inherently encoding rich geometric knowledge of real scenes. To leverage this, we design a Light-Geometry Dual-Branch Encoder that extracts both multi-illumination cues and geometric priors from the frozen 3D reconstruction model. We also address the limitations of the conventional orthographic projection assumption by introducing the PS-Perp dataset with realistic perspective projection to enable learning of spatially varying view directions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GeoUniPS delivers state-of-the-arts performance across multiple datasets, both quantitatively and qualitatively, especially in the complex in-the-wild scenes.