Photometric stereo for outdoor webcams

Abstract

We present a photometric stereo technique that operates on time-lapse sequences captured by static outdoor webcams over the course of several months. Outdoor webcams produce a large set of uncontrolled images subject to varying lighting and weather conditions. We first automatically select a suitable subset of the captured frames for further processing, reducing the dataset size by several orders of magnitude. A camera calibration step is applied to recover the camera response function, the absolute camera orientation, and to compute the light directions for each image. Finally, we describe a new photometric stereo technique for non-Lambertian scenes and unknown light source intensities to recover normal maps and spatially varying materials of the scene.