  A polarization camera has great potential for 3D reconstruction since the
angle of polarization (AoP) and the degree of polarization (DoP) of reflected
light are related to an object's surface normal. In this paper, we propose a
novel 3D reconstruction method called Polarimetric Multi-View Inverse Rendering
(Polarimetric MVIR) that effectively exploits geometric, photometric, and
polarimetric cues extracted from input multi-view color-polarization images. We
first estimate camera poses and an initial 3D model by geometric reconstruction
with a standard structure-from-motion and multi-view stereo pipeline. We then
refine the initial model by optimizing photometric rendering errors and
polarimetric errors using multi-view RGB, AoP, and DoP images, where we propose
a novel polarimetric cost function that enables an effective constraint on the
estimated surface normal of each vertex, while considering four possible
ambiguous azimuth angles revealed from the AoP measurement. The weight for the
polarimetric cost is effectively determined based on the DoP measurement, which
is regarded as the reliability of polarimetric information. Experimental
results using both synthetic and real data demonstrate that our Polarimetric
MVIR can reconstruct a detailed 3D shape without assuming a specific surface
material and lighting condition.
