  We present a single-shot system to recover surface geometry of objects with
spatially-varying albedos, from images captured under a calibrated RGB
photometric stereo setup---with three light directions multiplexed across
different color channels in the observed RGB image. Since the problem is
ill-posed point-wise, we assume that the albedo map can be modeled as
piece-wise constant with a restricted number of distinct albedo values. We show
that under ideal conditions, the shape of a non-degenerate local constant
albedo surface patch can theoretically be recovered exactly. Moreover, we
present a practical and efficient algorithm that uses this model to robustly
recover shape from real images. Our method first reasons about shape locally in
a dense set of patches in the observed image, producing shape distributions for
every patch. These local distributions are then combined to produce a single
consistent surface normal map. We demonstrate the efficacy of the approach
through experiments on both synthetic renderings as well as real captured
images.
