Gloss and shading enhance our 3D shape perception. Therefore, the appearance of specular reflection (gloss) and the diffuse reflection (shading) is thought to be one of clues for 3D shape perception. While the neural processing of these clues has not yet been extensively studied, one previous study isolated the following relevant image information for 3D perception [1]. In the light reflection process, the surrounding illumination is compressed depending on the second derivative (i.e., surface curvature) of the 3D shape, and this compression direction can be extracted from the image by populations of simple oriented filters ("orientation field"). Consequently, the "orientation field" has rich information about the 2nd derivative of the 3D shape. It is likely that our visual cortex use this kind of information for 3D perception because similar orientation extraction is performed in the primary visual cortex.
Here, we have made the estimation algorithm utilizing the "orientation field" as the 2nd derivative constraints to recover the 3D shape. We will show that 3D shape of a glossy object could be recovered by our estimation algorithm from a single and static image.

[1] R. W. Fleming, A. Torralba, and E. H. Adelson, Journal of Vision 4 (2004) 798.