ality, we assume a model of the surface controlled
by a finite set of parameters. The resulting para-
meter estimation SFS problem appears to be simpler
than the original one. The initial estimates are ob-
tained by means of analysis of the wavelet decom-
position of the given image and subsequently a para-
meter fitting process is carried out. Finally, an itera-
tive LM minimization procedure has been adopted in
our work in order to insure stable numerical conver-
gence. It should be mentioned here that this research
was initiated and partially sponsored by Applied Ma-
terials,Inc., so the real data is banned from being pub-
lished due to its high business sensitivity. Therefore
the whole method is explained using a synthetic but
illustrative example. This paper is organized as fol-
lows. In Section 2 we mathematically formulate the
SFS problem and briefly overview the previous rele-
vant work. Section 3 contains the description of the
new method. Section 4 presents results and discus-
sion.
2 THE SHAPE FROM SHADING
PROBLEM
2.1 General Problem Setup
The monocular SFS problem is defined as follows.
Suppose we are looking for a smooth height field
z = z(x,y) over region D ⊂ R
2
, and we are given its
shaded image I(x,y). The value of I at each point
depends on reflectance properties of the surface, its
gradient and imaging geometry parameters like light
direction e.t.c. This dependence is called a reflectance
function, and we denote it R = R(p,q), where p = z
x
and q = z
y
. The relationship
I(x, y) = R(p(x,y),q(x,y)) (1)
is called the irradiance equation and we state the SFS
problem as an attempt to recover the surface height
field z(x,y) from a single shaded image I(x, y) given
the reflectance function R, i.e. to determine z(x,y) that
satisfies (1). Some assumptions are to be made about
imaging geometry. First, we assume that the size of
the studied object is small, compared to the viewing
distance, which enables us to presume orthographic
projection to the image plane. We also assume that
the camera direction coincides with the Z axis. In this
case one can choose the coordinate system of both
image and object planes to be identical and denoted
by (X,Y). We denote η to be composite albedo which
essentially captures the energy dissipation properties
of the surface. We assume that η is constant along the
surface. We also denote
~
L to be the unit vector of the
illumination direction. We assume that there is only
one source of light located at infinity.
2.2 Imaging Models
By definition, if R(p,q) = η < ~n(x,y),
~
L > we say
that a surface exhibits Lambertian diffuse reflection
property. Here <,> is a standard inner product and
~n(x,y) = (−p,−q,1)/
p
p
2
+ q
2
+ 1 is a unit normal
vector to the surface. In case of SEM, the sim-
plest image formation model is given by R(p,q) =
η/<~n(x,y),
~
L >. This model holds well when spec-
imen is coated by gold and in absence of charging
artifacts (Reimer, 1993). It turns out that the prob-
lem of computing η and
~
L can be solved separately
(Zheng and Chellappa, 1991) and, therefore, we sup-
pose them to be known. We should note here that the
algorithm presented below in no way depends on any
particular imaging model.
2.3 Previous Work
The problem of SFS was stated by B. Horn in 70’s
(Horn, 1975). His first solution involved characteris-
tic strips expansion of the irradiance equation (1) and
was not stable in practice due the noise sensitivity and
error accumulation problems. During 80’s, Horn and
others (Horn and Brooks., 1986), (Zheng and Chel-
lappa, 1991) reformulated the problem and solved it
using the calculus of variations. Nice and comprehen-
sive analysis of other SFS techniques can be found
in (Zhang et al., 1999). Another important idea was
suggested by J. Atick (Atick et al., 1996). In this
work the authors dealt with the problem of recovering
of the shape of human faces from their shaded images.
In order to employ the a priori information about the
class of objects studied, Atick gives up generality (of
the variational approach) and solves the SFS prob-
lem for this particular class. The exact laser scans of
200 faces represented in a cylindrical coordinate sys-
tem {r
i
(θ,l)}
200
i=1
where regarded as independent re-
alizations of some stochastic process. Thus a ”face-
surface” can be represented as
r(θ,l) = r
0
(θ,l) +
M
∑
i=1
a
i
u
i
(θ,l) (2)
where r
0
(θ,l) is a ”mean-face”, and u
i
(θ,l) are the
first M components of Karhunen-Loeve decompo-
sition derived from the scanned surfaces, so-called
”eigen-faces”. So, denoting
~
α = (α
1
,α
2
,... ,α
M
) the
SFS problem can be reformulated as
min
~
α
∑
l,θ
(I(x(l,θ),y(l,θ)) − R(p, q;
~
α))
2
(3)