Interactive normal reconstruction from a single image

Abstract

We present an interactive system for reconstructing surface normals from a single image. Our approach has two complementary contributions. First, we introduce a novel shape-from-shading algorithm (SfS) that produces faithful normal reconstruction for local image region (high-frequency component), but it fails to faithfully recover the overall global structure (low-frequency component). Our second contribution consists of an approach that corrects low-frequency error using a simple markup procedure. This approach, aptly called rotation palette , allows the user to specify large scale corrections of surface normals by drawing simple stroke correspondences between the normal map and a sphere image which represents rotation directions. Combining these two approaches, we can produce high-quality surfaces quickly from single images.