A polarized image acquisition section shoots a subject through a
polarizing element operable to set principal axes of which directions are
different from each other. An incident plane specifying section specifies
an incident plane of each pixel, and an incident angle computation
section computes an incident angle of each pixel. A classifying section
clusters pixels similar to each other in both incident plane and incident
angle. A reflection component separation section performs reflection
component separation on each clustered pixel set on the assumption of
probabilistic independence between the diffuse reflection component and
the specular reflection component.