
work of deformable models: the SFS equation is expressed
as a constraint, all along the evolution. This last method,
which provides rather good results, has been extended to
perspective images in [28,29]. Albeit we consider this latter
work clearly as that yielding the be st results, the problem of
slowness (e.g., 10,000 iterations of 2 s each, at the most pre-
cise level with 10,000 triangles) makes this method techni-
cally impracticable to some extent. Another kind of
deformable models, namely, 2D-snakes, has been used in
[30], but once again, a special effort has to be done after-
wards, in order to connect the different snakes, which cor-
respond to parallel sections of the shape. The results are
not so good, to say at least.
A few papers have dealt with more complex models than
linear or quadratic ones. In [31], a superquadrics is used,
whose 10 parameters are estimated via genetic algorithms,
but no convincing result is shown. On the other hand, the
results reported in [32] are of good quality, even if the
method is intrinsically dedicated to face reconstruction.
Dealing with other types of scenes would require to refor-
mulate the main part of the problem.
Finally, let us mention some papers [33,34] in which the
use of a 3D (quadratic) model is not aimed at modeling the
surface, but at enforcing some ‘‘coherence criteria’’ on the
normals at each step of an iterative process.
All of existing works, as discussed below, aim at avoid-
ing the necessity of boundary conditions, thus solvi ng Pb2.
The methods described in [3,26,27,29], respectively, in
[3,23,24,31,32], more or less successfully grapple with
Pb1, respectively, with Pb3. On the other hand, Pb4 was
not addressed in these works and only [31] dealt with
Pb5, to some extent.
2.1.2. Our contribution
Using a 3D parametric model for the scene representa-
tion in SFS clearly prevents from the necessity of boundary
conditions, which are implicitly replaced by constraints on
the scene surface: Pb2 is solved at once. Nevertheless, as
this comes out again from the previous state of the art,
the choice of the model has great consequences upon the
other aforementioned problems. In this paper, we aim at
simultaneously circumscribe problems Pb1, Pb2, Pb3 but
also Pb4 (as explained in Section 2.2.2). We will consider
a 3D-sp line to model the surface shape which surprisingly
enough, has never been done before. It will be shown that
this model allows us to reach this aim, contrary to the pre-
viously cited works.
2.2. Selecting the reliable pixels
2.2.1. State of the art
Aiming at applying SFS methods not only to synthetic,
but also to real images, one must take into account the fact
that a number of pixels could be ‘‘unreliable’’ i.e., not in
accordance with the SFS hypotheses (Pb4). The classical
methods of resolution which consider one unknown per
pixel (the height of the conjugate point in the scene) cannot
straightforwardly discard the unreliable pixels, except
either by imposing smoothness on the height, or by making
holes in the reconstruction domain and by using a posteri-
ori interpolation. To cope with problem Pb4, interesting
alternatives have been proposed in some papers, where
the unreliable pixels, whose greylevels are yet biased, are
kept in the reconstruction domain, at the expense of great
efforts to make the methods more robust. We list now what
we think to be the most significant contributions dealing
with Pb4 in classical SFS. In [35], the Lambertian and spec-
ular reflection components are separated, using probabilis-
tic tools, in order to consider more realistic photometric
modelings than the purely Lambertian one. In [36], the
assumption of uniform albedo is questioned: the scene is
segmented into regions having different albedos. In [37],
shadow areas, which could be confused with areas of lower
albedos, are identified through the so-called ‘‘shading flow
field’’ procedure. The simpler situation of ‘‘black shadows’’
is astutely taken into account in [10], where it is considered
that the limit between light an d shadow belongs to the
shape to be reconstructed. An iterative algorithm is
reported in [38], which takes secondary reflections into
account. Finally, in [39,40], the standard regularization
theory is extended, in order to take visual discontinuities
such as occlusions into account.
2.2.2. Our contribution
It is then judicious to consider the parametric approach
to SFS versus the classical approach, since the former
intrinsically solves the problem of interpolation, and it also
prevents from the use of a smoothness term, which usually
moves the solution away from a minimizer of the intensity
error term. In parallel with the concept of reconstruction
domain X
r
, we introduce that of ‘‘us eful domain’’ X
u
.We
define the ‘‘maximal useful domain’’
X
u
as the set contain-
ing all the reliable pixels. To illustrate this notion, consider
the following example. Let us imagine that the rectangles in
Fig. 1-a represent unreliable areas in the image. We aim at
reconstructing the surface on the reconstruction domain X
r
represented in black in Fig. 1-b, which does not contain
holes. The maximal useful domain
X
u
, which contains
holes, is represented in black in Fig. 1-c. In order to recon-
struct the scene on the whole, while decreasing the comput-
ing time, we choose as useful domain X
u
only a subset of
X
u
, made up for example by the pixels represented in black
in Fig. 1-d. Only the pixel s of X
u
will be taken into account
to check the concordance of the 3D parametric model with
the image. This simple idea makes it possible to give a sat-
isfactory response to problem Pb4, while reducing the com-
puting time, as this will be seen in the experiments.
3. Spline from shading
3.1. Two SFS modelings
We attach a 3D frame (Cxyz ) to the camera, whose ori-
gin C is the optical center and such that axis C
z
coincides
468 F. Courteille et al. / Image and Vision Computing 26 (2008) 466–479
朗伯体反射和镜面发射成分相互独立,使用概率工具进行融
合,从而得到一个更加比纯朗伯体更加真实的情景。