Techniques are disclosed for reconstructing the surface geometry of an object using a single image. A computing device is configured to reconstruct a surface for a colored object from a single image using surface integrability as an additional constraint. The image is captured under an illumination of three fixed colored lights that correspond to three color channels, such as red, green and blue (RGB). The RGB image can be separated into three grayscale images, with different lighting for each image, and the geometry can be reconstructed by computing the surface normals of these separate images. Depth can be estimated by integrating the surface normals.