A practical approach based on Shape from Shading and Fast Marching for 3D geometry recovery under oblique illumination

Indexed in Thomson ISI. Abstract. Design of new industrial objects characterized by high stylistic content often starts from sketches or images of the product to be, subsequently, represented in a 3D digital form by using CAD software. To speed up this phase, a number of methods for automatic or semi-automatic translation of sketches or images into a 3D model have been devised all over the world also for reverse engineering purposes. When the image shading is a crucial information for recovering the final 3D shape, Fast Marching is recognized to be among the best method to date, especially for frontally illuminated scenes. Unfortunately, such a method cannot be directly applied when object illumination in the considered image is oblique. The present work is aimed to propose a simple, but effective, approach for recovering 3D shape of objects starting from single side illuminated scenes i.e. for solving non-eikonal SFS problems. Tested against a set of case studies, the method proved its effectiveness.