# Near-light Photometric Stereo with Symmetric Lights

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16404 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16404/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Normal Integration: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05940/) (2017)
- [Universal Photometric Stereo Network using Global Lighting Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02452/) (2022)
- [LUCES: A Dataset for Near-Field Point Light Source Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13135/) (2021)
- [LED-based Photometric Stereo: Modeling, Calibration and Numerical Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01018/) (2017)
- [Fast Light-Weight Near-Field Photometric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16515/) (2022)
- [A CNN Based Approach for the Point-Light Photometric Stereo Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04655/) (2022)
- [A CNN Based Approach for the Near-Field Photometric Stereo Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.05792/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper describes a linear solution method for near-light photometric stereo by exploiting symmetric light source arrangements. Unlike conventional non-convex optimization approaches, by arranging multiple sets of symmetric nearby light source pairs, our method derives a closed-form solution for surface normal and depth without requiring initialization. In addition, our method works as long as the light sources are symmetrically distributed about an arbitrary point even when the entire spatial offset is uncalibrated. Experiments showcase the accuracy of shape recovery accuracy of our method, achieving comparable results to the state-of-the-art calibrated near-light photometric stereo method while significantly reducing requirements of careful depth initialization and light calibration.