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Nearly all existing methods for stereo reconstruction assume that scene reflectance is Lambertian and make use of brightness constancy as a matching invariant. We introduce a new invariant for stereo reconstruction called light transport constancy (LTC), which allows completely arbitrary scene reflectance (bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs)). This invariant can be used to formulate a rank constraint on multiview stereo matching when the scene is observed by several lighting configurations in which only the lighting intensity varies. In addition, we show that this multiview constraint can be used with as few as two cameras and two lighting configurations. Unlike previous methods for BRDF invariant stereo, LTC does not require precisely configured or calibrated light sources or calibration objects in the scene. Importantly, the new constraint can be used to provide BRDF invariance to any existing stereo method whenever appropriate lighting variation is available.
Wang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.