Glossy Object Reconstruction with Cost-effective Polarized Acquisition

Abstract: The challenge of image-based 3D reconstruction for glossy objects lies in separating diffuse and specular components on glossy surfaces from captured images, a task complicated by the ambiguity in discerning lighting conditions and material properties using RGB data alone. While state-of-the-art methods rely on tailored and/or high-end equipment for data acquisition, which can be cumbersome and time-consuming, this work introduces a scalable polarization-aided approach that employs cost-effective acquisition tools. By attaching a linear polarizer to readily available RGB cameras, multi-view polarization images can be captured without the need for advance calibration or precise measurements of the polarizer angle, substantially reducing system construction costs. The proposed approach represents polarimetric BRDF, Stokes vectors, and polarization states of object surfaces as neural implicit fields. These fields, combined with the polarizer angle, are retrieved by optimizing the rendering loss of input polarized images. By leveraging fundamental physical principles for the implicit representation of polarization rendering, our method demonstrates superiority over existing techniques through experiments in public datasets and real captured images on both reconstruction and novel view synthesis.