Polarization-Based Shape Estimation of Transparent Objects by Using Raytracing and

Though there are many cultural assets which are made of glasses, most of the existing methods cannot estimate the shape of transparent objects with enough accuracy. We propose a novel method for estimating the surface shape of transparent objects by analyzing the polarization state of the light. Existing methods slightly consider the reflec-tion, refraction, and transmission of the light occurring in-side a transparent object. We employ a polarization ray-tracing method to compute both the path of the light and its polarization state. Our proposed iterative computation method estimates the surface shape of the transparent ob-ject by minimizing the difference between the polarization data rendered by the polarization ray-tracing method and the polarization data obtained from a real object. 1