When unpolarized light is reflected from a smooth dielectric surface, it becomes partially polarized. This is due to the orientation of dipoles induced in the reflecting medium and applies to both specular and diffuse reflection. This paper is concerned with exploiting polarization by surface reflection, using images of smooth dielectric objects, to recover surface normals and, hence, height. This paper presents the underlying physics of polarization by reflection, starting with the Fresnel equations. These equations are used to interpret images taken with a linear polarizer and digital camera, revealing the shape of the objects. Experimental results are presented that illustrate that the technique is accurate near object limbs, as the theory predicts, with less precise, but still useful, results elsewhere. A detailed analysis of the accuracy of the technique for a variety of materials is presented. A method for estimating refractive indices using a laser and linear polarizer is also given.

This paper describes a Bayesian framework for performing relational graph matching by discrete relaxation. Our basic aim is to draw on this framework to provide a comparative evaluation of a number of contrasting approaches to relational matching. Broadly speaking there are two main aspects to this study. Firstly we focus on the issue of how relational inexactness may be quantified. We illustrate that several popular relational distance measures can be recovered as specific limiting cases of the Bayesian consistency measure. The second aspect of our comparison concerns the way in which structural inexactness is controlled. We investigate three different realizations of the matching process which draw on contrasting control models. The main conclusion of our study is that the active process of graph-editing outperforms the alternatives in terms of its ability to effectively control a large population of contaminating clutter.

This paper exploits the properties of the commute time between nodes of a graph for the purposes of clustering and embedding and explores its applications to image segmentation and multibody motion tracking. Our starting point is the lazy random walk on the graph, which is determined by the heat kernel of the graph and can be computed from the spectrum of the graph Laplacian. We characterize the random walk using the commute time (that is, the expected time taken for a random walk to travel between two nodes and return) and show how this quantity may be computed from the Laplacian spectrum using the discrete Green's function. Our motivation is that the commute time can be anticipated to be a more robust measure of the proximity of data than the raw proximity matrix. In this paper, we explore two applications of the commute time. The first is to develop a method for image segmentation using the eigenvector corresponding to the smallest eigenvalue of the commute time matrix. We show that our commute time segmentation method has the property of enhancing the intragroup coherence while weakening intergroup coherence and is superior to the normalized cut. The second application is to develop a robust multibody motion tracking method using an embedding based on the commute time. Our embedding procedure preserves commute time and is closely akin to kernel PCA, the Laplacian eigenmap, and the diffusion map. We illustrate the results on both synthetic image sequences and real-world video sequences and compare our results with several alternative methods.