Specularity removal and relighting of 3D object model for virtual exhibition

To create photorealistic three-dimensional (3D) model of real objects is a challenging computer vision problem. While there are methods for 3D digitization of objects with high geometric resolution, there are still limitations in achieving high textural resolution. One problem is that the object surface exhibits specular reflection of illuminated light during the image acquisition. We propose a method that is applicable for the separation of diffuse and specular reflection components in multi-view image sequence. The specular chromaticity is replaced by the corresponding diffuse chromaticity which can always be found in neighboring views with the highlights already faded away. The diffuse image sequence is used to create the texture map. The 3D object model is relit for virtual exhibition. Our method is able to remove wide lobe highlights and maintain high fidelity in the texture boundary. © 2008 IEEE.