# 3D Face Reconstruction Using Color Photometric Stereo with Uncalibrated Near Point Lights

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.02605 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02605/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 4 Apr 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [HeadRecon: High-Fidelity 3D Head Reconstruction from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08863/) (2023)
- [Near-Light Color Photometric Stereo for Mono-Chromatic Non-Lambertian Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12666/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a new color photometric stereo (CPS) method that recovers high quality, detailed 3D face geometry in a single shot. Our system uses three uncalibrated near point lights of different colors and a single camera. For robust self-calibration of the light sources, we use 3D morphable model (3DMM) and semantic segmentation of facial parts. We address the spectral ambiguity problem by incorporating albedo consensus, albedo similarity, and proxy prior into a unified framework. We avoid the need for spatial constancy of albedo; instead, we use a new measure for albedo similarity that is based on the albedo norm profile. Experiments show that our new approach produces state-of-the-art results from single image with high-fidelity geometry that includes details such as wrinkles.