Near-infrared monocular 3D computational polarization imaging of surfaces exhibiting nonuniform reflectance

This paper presents a near-infrared (NIR) monocular 3D computational polarization imaging method to directly reconstruct the shape of surfaces exhibiting nonuniform reflectance. A reference gradient field is introduced to the weight constraints for globally correcting the ambiguity of the surface normal for a target with nonuniform reflectance. We experimentally demonstrated that our method can reconstruct the shape of surfaces exhibiting nonuniform reflectance in not only the near field but also the far field. Moreover, with the proposed method, the axial resolution can be kept constant even under different object distances as long as the ratio of the focal length to the object distance is fixed. The simplicity and robustness of the proposed method make it an attractive tool for the fast modeling of 3D scenes. (C) 2021 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement

Automated summary

This paper introduces a near-infrared monocular 3D computational polarization imaging method to reconstruct the shape of surfaces with nonuniform reflectance. Experimental results show that the method can achieve good reconstruction in both near and far fields, while maintaining a constant axial resolution. The simplicity and robustness of the method make it an attractive tool for fast 3D scene modeling.