An improved method of photometric stereo using local shape from shading

This paper presents an improved photometric stereo (PS) method by integrating it with a local shape from shading (SFS) algorithm. PS produces the initial estimate of image for the global accuracy and also provides the recovery of albedo, SFS supplies the more detailed information within each homogeneous area. The quality of depth obtained by integrating PS and SFS is compared with the real depth using absolute dept error function, and the improvement ranging from 2.3 to 14% over PS is obtained