We conduct a thorough study of photomet-ric stereo under nearby point light source illumination, from modeling to numerical solution, through calibration. In the classical formulation of photometric stereo, the luminous uxes are assumed to be directional, which is very dicult to achieve in practice. Rather, we use light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to illuminate the scene to be reconstructed. Such point light sources are very convenient to use, yet they yield a more complex photo-metric stereo model which is arduous to solve. We rst derive in a physically sound manner this model, and show how to calibrate its parameters. Then, we discuss two state-of-the-art numerical solutions. The rst one alternatingly estimates the albedo and the normals, and then integrates the normals into a depth map. It is shown empirically to be independent from the ini-tialization, but convergence of this sequential approach is not established. The second one directly recovers the depth, by formulating photometric stereo as a system of nonlinear partial dierential equations (PDEs), which are linearized using image ratios. Although the sequential approach is avoided, initialization matters a lot and convergence is not established either. Therefore, we introduce a provably convergent alternating reweighted least-squares scheme for solving the original system of nonlinear PDEs. Finally, we extend this study to the case of RGB images.
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