In this paper, based on the constrained optimizatin technique and direct recovery method, we proesent a shape form shading (SFS) algorithm to recover a 3-D shape form an image. More specifically, we first employ the membrane model for a smoothness constraint to revoer a 3-D shape coarsely. We then compute the surface height directly to reduce the shape distortion due to a regularization term. In our approach, we can obtain a stable and accurate solution by the application of these two steps. Several simulation results on various images are provided and discussed in this paper and they show that the proposed algorithm extracts the 3-D information accurately and efficiently.