Towards Illumination-invariant 3D Reconstruction using ToF RGB-D Cameras

Creating textured 3D scans of indoor environments has experienced a large boost with the advent of cheap com-modity depth sensors. However, the quality of the acquired 3D models is often impaired by color seams in the re-construction due to varying illumination (e.g., shadows or highlights) and object surfaces whose brightness and color vary with the viewpoint of the camera. In this paper, we propose a direct and simple method to estimate the pure albedo of the texture, which allows us to remove illumina-tion effects from IR and color images. Our approach first computes the illumination-independent albedo in the IR do-main, which we subsequently transfer to the color albedo. As shadows and highlights lead to over- and underexposed image regions with little or no color information, we apply an advanced optimization scheme to infer color informa-tion in the color albedo from neighboring image regions. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach to vari-ous real-world scenes. 1