  Photometric Stereo methods seek to reconstruct the 3d shape of an object from
motionless images obtained with varying illumination. Most existing methods
solve a restricted problem where the physical reflectance model, such as
Lambertian reflectance, is known in advance. In contrast, we do not restrict
ourselves to a specific reflectance model. Instead, we offer a method that
works on a wide variety of reflectances. Our approach uses a simple yet
uncommonly used property of the problem - the sought after normals are points
on a unit hemisphere. We present a novel embedding method that maps pixels to
normals on the unit hemisphere. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach
outperforms existing manifold learning methods for the task of hemisphere
embedding. We further show successful reconstructions of objects from a wide
variety of reflectances including smooth, rough, diffuse and specular surfaces,
even in the presence of significant attached shadows. Finally, we empirically
prove that under these challenging settings we obtain more accurate shape
reconstructions than existing methods.
