So in general, when we think of Single View Reconstruction we think of working with planes, simple textures and so on... Generally, simple objects from nature's point of view. But what about such thing as wet beach stones? I wonder if there are any algorithms that could help with reconstructing 3d from single picture of stones?
Shape from shading would be my first angle of attack.
Smooth wet rocks, such as those in the first image, may exhibit predictable specular properties allowing one to estimate the surface normal based only on the brightness value and the relative angle between the camera and the light source (the sun).
If you are able to segment individual rocks, like those in the second photo, you could probably estimate the parameters of the ground plane by making some assumptions about all the rocks in the scene being similar in size and lying on said ground plane.