Single-Shot Facial Capture using Polarized RGB Sinusoidal Illumination

We present a novel single-shot method for capturing high-quality facial appearance that enables per-pixel estimation of diffuse albedo, specular albedo, specular roughness, and photometric (specular) normals using only linearly polarized RGB illumination and consumer cameras. Our approach leverages color-multiplexed sinusoidal lighting encoded across RGB channels, allowing phase-based decomposition of reflectance parameters per view, without time-multiplexing or iterative refinement. Unlike prior works that jointly optimize appearance and geometry, we decouple the estimation process – separately recovering spatially-varying specular albedo and roughness for the first time in a single-shot capture setup. Additionally, we estimate high-frequency specular photometric normals independently using view-dependent specular phase cues, obtaining accurate surface mesostructure. We demonstrate our system using a practical monitor-based capture setup with 15 polarized DSLRs, producing detailed reflectance maps suitable for photorealistic rendering. Our approach achieves higher accuracy in reflectance separation and more accurate estimation of fine-scale surface details compared to previous single-shot methods.