1. A method for shape and material recovery from object motion of an object, comprising: modeling using a processor dichromatic dependence of surface reflectance on surface normal, lighting and viewing directions to derive a differential flow relation from an image of the object; determining a rank deficiency in a sequence of differential flow relations and use the rank deficiency to handle complex bidirectional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs); estimating BRDF-derivatives from the differential flow relations to recover the complex BRDF; and reconstructing depth of the object without knowledge of their BRDFs for joint shape and material recovery; and using the rank deficiency to recover depth and reflectance of the object.