Abstract
Multi-spectral photometric stereo can recover pixel-wise surface normal from a single RGB image. The difficulty lies in that the intensity in each channel is the tangle of illumination, albedo and camera response; thus, an initial estimate of the normal is required in optimization-based solutions. In this paper, we propose to make a rough depth estimation using the deep convolutional neural network (CNN) instead of using depth sensors or binocular stereo devices. Since high-resolution ground-truth data is expensive to obtain, we designed a network and trained it with rendered images of synthetic 3D objects. We use the model to predict initial normal of real-world objects and iteratively optimize the fine-scale geometry in the multi-spectral photometric stereo framework. The experimental results illustrate the improvement of the proposed method compared with existing methods.