Illumination Estimation of 3D Surface Texture Based on Active Basis
Junyu Dong Liyuan Su
Department of Computer Science
Ocean University of China
Qingdao, China
Email: {dongjunyu,suliyuan}@ouc.edu.cn
Yuanxu Duan
Alcatel-Lucent R&D
Qingdao, China
Email: duanyx1999@163.com
Abstract—This paper describes an approach to estimate
illumination directions of 3D surface texture based on Active
Basis. Instead of applying Gabor wavelet transform to extract
texture features, we represent our texture features with a simple
Haar feature to improve efficiency. The Active Basis model can
be learned from training image patches by the shared pursuit
algorithm. The base histogram can then be obtained based
on each model. We measure the illumination directions by
minimizing the Euclidean distance and the entropy difference
of base histograms between the test image and the training
sets. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and
accuracy of the proposed approach.
Keywords-3D Surface Texture; Illumination Estimation; Ac-
tive Basis; Feature extraction;
I. I NTRODUCTION
Texture analysis plays an important role in computer
vision and computer graphics. Real world textures are
seldom flat and may consist of rough surface geometry
and various reflectance properties. These textures can be
called 3D surface texture. Changes in incident illumination
angles upon a 3D surface texture can significantly affect
its appearance [1]. Estimating illumination directions of
3D surface texture is therefore important in many tasks in
computer vision and realistic graphics rendering.
Early studies on illumination direction estimation [2][3]
are based on techniques from Shape from Shading. There
are many constraints have to be imposed in order to find a
reasonable solution. Recently, Koenderink and Pont [4] de-
velop a theory based on second order statistics for estimating
the illuminant’s azimuth from a single image formed under
the Lambertian model. Their algorithm is restricted by the
fact that they require the surface is an isotropic, Gaussian
random surface with constant albedo. Varma and Zisserman
[5] then extend the method by Koenderink and Pont to deal
with cases where the albedo is spatially varying. Although it
can recover the azimuthal angle much more accurately, this
estimation mechanism fails on strongly anisotropic textures.
This paper proposes a method to estimate the azimuthal
angle of illuminant for 3D surface textures. The method con-
sists of two phases. Firstly 3D surface texture classification
is performed to determine texture classes by using wavelet-
packet features [6] and support vector machines [7]. Then
a new method called Active Basis is employed to reflect
illumination direction features. The Active Basis model can
be learned from training image patches by the shared pursuit
algorithm, which was originally developed by Wu et al.
in [8]. Finally, the histograms of Active Basis are compared
to estimate the illumination direction of surface textures.
The basic idea of this paper is based on the fact that
illumination from certain direction can cause the surface
bumps towards the light source become brighter and exhibit
”edge” property (Figure 2). Apparently, when the texture is
anisotropic, due to the high response between strong sur-
face texture structures and illumination, ”edge” information
corresponding to the illumination direction can be easily
modeled by Active Basis. Differing from the work in [5],
our method can correctly deal with the anisotropic texture
surfaces and also performs well on some isotropic textures.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II
describes 3D surface texture classification. In section III we
present details on learning of the Active Basis model and
estimation of illumination directions. Results produced by
our method are presented in section IV. In section V we
draw our conclusions.
II. THREE- DIMENSIONAL SURFACE TEXTURE
CLASSIFICATION
We first determine the texture classes using wavelet-based
features and support vector machines.
A. Feature extraction based on wavelet-packet decomposi-
tion
Since feature extraction based on wavelet transform can
provide more details and can be effectively used in distin-
guishing textures classes, we use wavelet-packet decompo-
sition to represent characteristics of different textures.
We apply a two-scale and full Daubechies wavelet packet
decomposition on each texture image. Since each wavelet
packet tree has large number of possible decomposition, an
entropy-based cost function is then employed to decide the
optimal of decomposition.
We can generate the feature vector: F =
{m
1
,v
1
,m
2
,v
2
,m
3
,v
3
,m
4
,v
4
,m
5
,v
5
,m
6
,v
6
,m
7
,v
7
},
where m and v are the means and variances of selected
wavelet sub band coefficients (See [6] for more details).
2010 International Conference on Pattern Recognition
1051-4651/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICPR.2010.219
874
2010 International Conference on Pattern Recognition
1051-4651/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICPR.2010.219
874
2010 International Conference on Pattern Recognition
1051-4651/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICPR.2010.219
870
2010 International Conference on Pattern Recognition
1051-4651/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICPR.2010.219
870
2010 International Conference on Pattern Recognition
1051-4651/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICPR.2010.219
870