Towards Illumination-Invariant 3D Reconstruction Using ToF RGB-D Cameras

Creating textured 3D scans of indoor environments has experienced a large boost with the advent of cheap commodity depth sensors. However, the quality of the acquired 3D models is often impaired by color seams in the reconstruction due to varying illumination (e.g., Shadows or highlights) and object surfaces whose brightness and color vary with the viewpoint of the camera. In this paper, we propose a direct and simple method to estimate the pure albedo of the texture, which allows us to remove illumination effects from IR and color images. Our approach first computes the illumination-independent albedo in the IR domain, which we subsequently transfer to the color albedo. As shadows and highlights lead to over- and underexposed image regions with little or no color information, we apply an advanced optimization scheme to infer color information in the color albedo from neigh boring image regions. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach to various real-world scenes.