Multi-View Inverse Rendering under Arbitrary Illumination and Albedo

3D shape reconstruction with multi-view stereo (MVS) relies on a robust evaluation of photo consistencies across images. The robustness is ensured by isolating surface albedo and scene illumination from the shape recovery, i.e. shading and colour variation are regarded as a nuisance in MVS. This yields a gap in the qualities between the recovered shape and the images used. We present a method to address it by jointly estimating detailed shape, illumination and albedo using the initial shape robustly recovered by MVS. This is achieved by solving the multi-view inverse rendering problem using the geometric and photometric smoothness terms and the normalized spherical harmonics illumination model. Our method allows spatially-varying albedo and per image illumination without any prerequisites such as training data or image segmentation. We demonstrate that our method can clearly improve the 3D shape and recover illumination and albedo on real world scenes.