Shape from shading
Suppose
Edittex
Edittex
You can directly measure angle between normal and light source
Not quite enough information to compute surface shape
But can be if you add some additional info, for example
assume a few of the normals are known (e.g., along silhouette)
constraints on neighboring normals—“integrability”
smoothness
Hard to get it to work well in practice
plus, how many real objects have constant albedo?