Geometric Point Light Source Calibration

Abstract

We present a light position calibration technique based on a general arrangement of at least two reflective spheres in a single image. Contrary to other techniques we do not directly intersect rays for triangulation but instead solve for the optimal light position by evaluating the image-space error of the light highlights reflected from the spheres. This approach has been very successful in the field of Structure-from-Motion estimation. It has not been applied to light source calibration because determining the reflection point on the sphere to project the highlight back in the image is a challenging problem. We show a solution and define a novel, non-linear error function to recover the position of a point light source. We also introduce a light position estimation that is based on observing the light source directly in multiple images which does not use any reflections. Finally, we evaluate both proposed techniques and the classical ray intersection method in several scenarios with real data.