Abstract: Inverse rendering is a budding technique. Its goal is to obtain information of illumination, reflectance properties and textures of real objects. Reflectance recovery is a key problem in inverse rendering. An approach to recovering the reflectance properties of a textured object from photographs is introduced. Assuming that the object has a constant specular reflectance property over its surface, the BRDF can be approximated by a constant specular component and a varying diffuse component. Thus the problem becomes much easier to solve. First, a patch on the surface is selected, several pictures are taken under different viewing and lighting conditions for it, and the average specular reflectance parameter value of this patch is recovered and regarded as the value over the whole surface. Then the specular component and the diffuse component of each sample are separated, and with the separated diffuse component, the diffuse reflectance parameters for each point on the surface can be recovered. The test results show that the method is effective for textured objects with constant specular reflectance properties.