Mobile Photometric Stereo with Keypoint-Based SLAM for Dense 3D Reconstruction

The standard photometric stereo is a technique to densely reconstruct objects' surfaces using light variation under the assumption of a static camera with a moving light source. In this work, we use photometric stereo to reconstruct dense 3D scenes while moving the camera and the light altogether. In such non-static case, camera poses as well as correspondences between pixels of each frame to apply photometric stereo are required. ORB-SLAM is a technique that can be used to estimate camera poses. To retrieve correspondences, our idea is to start from a sparse 3D mesh obtained with ORB SLAM and then densify the mesh by a plane sweep method using a multi-view photometric consistency. By combining ORB-SLAM and photometric stereo, it is possible to reconstruct dense 3D scenes with a off-the-shelf smartphone and its embedded torchlight. Note that SLAM systems usually struggle with textureless object, which is effectively compensated by the photometric stereo in our method. Experiments are conducted to show that our proposed method gives better results than SLAM alone or COLMAP, especially for partially textureless surfaces.