  A polarization camera has great potential for 3D reconstruction since the
angle of polarization (AoP) of reflected light is 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 and polarimetric rendering errors using
multi-view RGB and AoP images, where we propose a novel polarimetric rendering
cost function that enables us to effectively constrain each estimated surface
vertex's normal while considering four possible ambiguous azimuth angles
revealed from the AoP measurement. Experimental results using both synthetic
and real data demonstrate that our Polarimetric MVIR can reconstruct a detailed
3D shape without assuming a specific polarized reflection depending on the
material.
