Detection and segmentation of mirror-like surfaces using structured illumination

Abstract

In computer vision, many active illumination techniques employ Projector-Camera systems to extract useful information from the scenes. Known illumination patterns are projected onto the scene and their deformations in the captured images are then analyzed. We observe that the local frequencies in the captured pattern for the mirror-like surfaces is different from the projected pattern. This property allows us to design a custom Projector-Camera system to segment mirror-like surfaces by analyzing the local frequencies in the captured images. The system projects a sinusoidal pattern and capture the images from projector's point of view. We present segmentation results for the scenes including multiple reflections and inter-reflections from the mirror-like surfaces. The method can further be used in the separation of direct and global components for the mirror-like surfaces by illuminating the non-mirror-like objects separately. We show how our method is also useful for accurate estimation of shape of the non-mirror-like regions in the presence of mirror-like regions in a scene.