# SPLINE-Net: Sparse Photometric Stereo through Lighting Interpolation and Normal Estimation Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.04088 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04088/

## Key facts

- Cited by 24 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [PS-NeRF: Neural Inverse Rendering for Multi-view Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11406/) (2022)
- [Shape and Material Capture at Home](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06397/) (2021)
- [S3-NeRF: Neural Reflectance Field from Shading and Shadow under a Single Viewpoint](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08936/) (2022)
- [Neural Reflectance for Shape Recovery with Shadow Handling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12909/) (2022)
- [Neural Radiance Fields Approach to Deep Multi-View Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05594/) (2021)
- [Self-calibrating Photometric Stereo by Neural Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07815/) (2022)
- [Multi-View Photometric Stereo Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07670/) (2022)
- [PS-Transformer: Learning Sparse Photometric Stereo Network using Self-Attention Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11386/) (2022)
- [A CNN Based Approach for the Point-Light Photometric Stereo Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04655/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning Methods for Calibrated Photometric Stereo and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08414/) (2022)
- [DeepPS2: Revisiting Photometric Stereo Using Two Differently Illuminated Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02025/) (2022)
- [DANI-Net: Uncalibrated Photometric Stereo by Differentiable Shadow Handling, Anisotropic Reflectance Modeling, and Neural Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15101/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Spatial and Photometric Context for Calibrated Non-Lambertian Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12106/) (2021)
- [Incorporating Lambertian Priors into Surface Normals Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07192/) (2021)
- [Physics-Free Spectrally Multiplexed Photometric Stereo under Unknown Spectral Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20716/) (2024)
- [MS-PS: A Multi-Scale Network for Photometric Stereo With a New Comprehensive Training Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14118/) (2022)
- [RMAFF-PSN: A Residual Multi-Scale Attention Feature Fusion Photometric Stereo Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07766/) (2024)
- [Imperceptible Adversarial Examples for Fake Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01615/) (2021)
- [NeIF: Representing General Reflectance as Neural Intrinsics Fields for Uncalibrated Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08897/) (2022)
- [Open-World Object Detection via Discriminative Class Prototype Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11757/) (2023)
- [Event Fusion Photometric Stereo Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00308/) (2023)
- [LIPIDS: Learning-based Illumination Planning In Discretized (Light) Space for Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02716/) (2024)
- [PS-EIP: Robust Photometric Stereo Based on Event Interval Profile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18341/) (2025)
- [FlashNormal: Detailed Surface Normal Estimation from Flash and No-Flash Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25360/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper solves the Sparse Photometric stereo through Lighting Interpolation and Normal Estimation using a generative Network (SPLINE-Net). SPLINE-Net contains a lighting interpolation network to generate dense lighting observations given a sparse set of lights as inputs followed by a normal estimation network to estimate surface normals. Both networks are jointly constrained by the proposed symmetric and asymmetric loss functions to enforce isotropic constrain and perform outlier rejection of global illumination effects. SPLINE-Net is verified to outperform existing methods for photometric stereo of general BRDFs by using only ten images of different lights instead of using nearly one hundred images.