Using Dirichlet Free Form Deformation to fit deformable models to noisy 3-D data

Abstract. Free-form deformations (FFD) constitute an important geometric shape modification method that has been extensively investigated for computer animation and geometric modelling. In this work, we show that FFDs are also very effective to fit deformable models to the kind of noisy 3–D data that vision algorithms such as stereo tend to produce. We advocate the use of Dirichlet Free Form Deformation (DFFD) instead of more conventional FFDs because they give us the ability to place control points at arbitrary locations rather than on a regular lattice, and thusmuch greater flexibility. We tested our approach on stereo data acquired from monocular video-sequences and show that it can be successfully used to reconstruct a complex object such as the whole head, including the neck and the ears, as opposed to the face only.