Error Analysis of Photometric Stereo with Near Quasi‐Point Lights

Abstract

The shape recovery quality of photometric stereo is sensitive to complicated error factors under close range lighting of quasi‐point lights. However, the error performance of photometric stereo under this practical scenario is still obscure. This paper presents a comprehensive error analysis of photometric stereo with near quasi‐point lights (NQPL‐PS). Five main error factors are identified under this scenario and their corresponding analytical formulations are introduced. Statistic computation and experiments are used to validate the theoretical formulations and inspect the relationships between normal inaccuracies and each type of discrepancies. In addition, the impacts of multiple system parameters of an NQPL‐PS configuration on the normal estimation error are also studied. In order to evaluate the relative importance of various error factors, a probability‐based evaluation criterion is proposed, which focuses on the error performance over the state space and the error space, rather than the simple comparison of the values of normal inaccuracy. The assessment results show that the non‐uniformity of illuminants, and the calibration error in the position of light sources hold the dominant places among those five error factors. This paper provides insights for the accuracy improvement and system design of NQPL‐PS.