What Can an Image of a Smooth Lambertian Surface Tell About Camera Nonlinearity?

This paper investigates the use of a single image of a smooth Lambertian surface to calibrate and remove some image nonlinearities due to the imaging device. To the best of our knowledge, this has not been addressed before in the literature. We show that this is possible, both theoretically and practically, taking advantage of some local shading measures that vary nonlinearly as a function of luminance and geometric nonlinearities (e.g., gamma correction and lens distortion). This can work as a basis for developing a simple method to estimate these nonlinearities from a single image. Several experiments are reported to validate the proposed method.