# Neural Multi-View Self-Calibrated Photometric Stereo without Photometric Stereo Cues

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23162 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23162/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10689/) (2021)
- [Volume Rendering of Neural Implicit Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12052/) (2021)
- [Implicit Geometric Regularization for Learning Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10099/) (2020)
- [NeRV: Neural Reflectance and Visibility Fields for Relighting and View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03927/) (2020)
- [Neuralangelo: High-Fidelity Neural Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03092/) (2023)
- [NeRD: Neural Reflectance Decomposition from Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03918/) (2020)
- [SAL: Sign Agnostic Learning of Shapes from Raw Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10414/) (2019)
- [NeRF in the Dark: High Dynamic Range View Synthesis from Noisy Raw Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13679/) (2021)
- [IRON: Inverse Rendering by Optimizing Neural SDFs and Materials from Photometric Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02232/) (2022)
- [NeILF: Neural Incident Light Field for Physically-based Material Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07182/) (2022)
- [NerfAcc: Efficient Sampling Accelerates NeRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04966/) (2023)
- [PS-NeRF: Neural Inverse Rendering for Multi-view Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11406/) (2022)
- [Multi-View Photometric Stereo: A Robust Solution and Benchmark Dataset for Spatially Varying Isotropic Materials](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06659/) (2020)
- [PANDORA: Polarization-Aided Neural Decomposition Of Radiance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13458/) (2022)
- [Self-calibrating Deep Photometric Stereo Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07366/) (2019)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Deep Multi-View Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13071/) (2022)
- [Scalable, Detailed and Mask-Free Universal Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15724/) (2023)
- [Neural Radiance Fields Approach to Deep Multi-View Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05594/) (2021)
- [NeISF: Neural Incident Stokes Field for Geometry and Material Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13187/) (2023)
- [A Differential Volumetric Approach to Multi-View Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01984/) (2018)
- [WildLight: In-the-wild Inverse Rendering with a Flashlight](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14190/) (2023)
- [SuperNormal: Neural Surface Reconstruction via Multi-View Normal Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04803/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Multi-View Azimuth Stereo via Tangent Space Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16447/) (2023)
- [RNb-NeuS: Reflectance and Normal-based Multi-View 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01215/) (2023)
- [NeISF++: Neural Incident Stokes Field for Polarized Inverse Rendering of Conductors and Dielectrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10189/) (2024)
- [Differentiable Point-based Inverse Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02480/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a neural inverse rendering approach that jointly reconstructs geometry, spatially varying reflectance, and lighting conditions from multi-view images captured under varying directional lighting. Unlike prior multi-view photometric stereo methods that require light calibration or intermediate cues such as per-view normal maps, our method jointly optimizes all scene parameters from raw images in a single stage. We represent both geometry and reflectance as neural implicit fields and apply shadow-aware volume rendering. A spatial network first predicts the signed distance and a reflectance latent code for each scene point. A reflectance network then estimates reflectance values conditioned on the latent code and angularly encoded surface normal, view, and light directions. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art normal-guided approaches in shape and lighting estimation accuracy, generalizes to view-unaligned multi-light images, and handles objects with challenging geometry and reflectance.
