A method for shape and material recovery of an object observed under a moving camera by detecting a change in image intensity induced by motion to corresponding variation in surface geometry and dichromatic reflectance; receiving a sequence of three camera motions to yield a linear system that decouples shape and bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs) terms; applying linearities in differential stereo relations to recover shape from camera motion cues, with unknown lighting and dichromatic BRDFs; and recovering unknown shape and reflectance of the object with dichromatic BRDF, using camera motion cues.