The technical scheme of the invention comprises a material appearance acquisition system and a material appearance acquisition method based on a single image. The material appearance acquisition method comprises the steps of: acquiring a picture and basic parameters, segmenting the picture to obtain non-highlight diffuse reflection and specular reflection images; segmenting the diffuse reflection image, and further decomposing the diffuse reflection image to obtain a diffuse reflection coefficient image and a bright-dark image; calculating the bright-dark image to obtain a depth image and converting the depth image into a normal image; initializing highlight coefficients and specular reflection coefficients; and carrying out further optimization calculation on corresponding images and parameters obtained by means of a highlight segmentation module, an image estimation module and a shape recovery module. The material appearance acquisition system and the material appearance acquisition method have the beneficial effects that more realistic texture mappings including the diffuse reflection coefficient image, the specular reflection coefficient image, the normal image and the highlight coefficient image can be automatically generated by means of the single image without manual intervention.