Polarimetric Normal Stereo

We introduce a novel method for recovering per-pixel surface normals from a pair of polarization cameras. Unlike past methods that use polarimetric observations as auxiliary features for correspondence matching, we fully integrate them in cost volume construction and filtering to directly recover per-pixel surface normals, not as byproducts of recovered disparities. Our key idea is to introduce a polarimetric cost volume of distance defined on the polarimetric observations and the polarization state computed from the surface normal. We adapt a belief propagation algorithm to filter this cost volume. The filtering algorithm simultaneously estimates the disparities and surface normals as separate entities, while effectively denoising the original noisy polarimetric observations of a quad-Bayer polarization camera. In addition, in contrast to past methods, we model polarimetric light reflection of mesoscopic surface roughness, which is essential to account for its illumination-dependency. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a number of complex, real objects. Our method offers a simple and detailed 3D sensing capability for complex, non-Lambertian surfaces.