Structure estimation and surface triangulation of deformable objects

A system is developed that from an image sequence of a deformable object automatically extracts features and tracks them through the sequence, estimates the non-rigid 3D structure and finally computes a surface triangulation. Also the camera motion is acquired. The object is supposed to deform according to a linear model, while the motion of the camera can be arbitrary. No domain specific prior of the object is required. For the structure estimation a two-step approach is used, where we first obtain an initial estimate of the structure and motion, and then obtain an optimal solution via a non-linear optimization scheme. The triangulation is optimized to yield a non-rigid faceted surface that well approximates the true 3D surface