Spatial Polarization Multiplexing: Single-Shot Invisible Shape and Reflectance Recovery

We propose spatial polarization multiplexing (SPM) for joint sensing of shape and reflectance of a static or dynamic deformable object, which is also invisible to the naked eye. Past structured-light methods are limited to shape acquisition and cannot recover reflectance as they alter scene appearance. Our key idea is to spatially multiplex a polarization pattern to encode the incident ray and also densely sample the reflected light. We derive a quantized polarized light pattern that can be robustly and uniquely decoded from the reflected Angle of Linear Polarization (AoLP) values. It also enables single-shot disentanglement of polarimetric diffuse and specular reflections for accurate BRDF estimation. We achieve this spatial polarization multiplexing (SPM) with a constrained de Bruijn sequence. We validate this novel invisible single-shot shape and reflectance method with real static and dynamic objects. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of SPM for accurate shape and BRDF measurement which opens new avenues of application for 3D sensing thanks to its invisibility and ability to jointly recover the radiometric properties.