Mesostructure from Specularity

We describe a simple and robust method for surface mesostructure acquisition. Our method builds on the observation that specular reflection is a reliable visual cue for surface mesostructure perception. In contrast to most photometric stereo methods, which take specularities as outliers and discard them, we propose a progressive acquisition system that captures a dense specularity field as the only information for mesostructure reconstruction. Our method can efficiently recover surfaces with fine-scale geometric details from complex real-world objects with a wide variety of reflection properties, including translucent, low albedo, and highly specular objects. We show results for a variety of objects including human skin, dried apricot, orange, jelly candy, black leather and dark chocolate.