Dense image registration and deformable surface reconstruction in presence of occlusions and minimal texture

Deformable surface tracking from monocular images is well-known to be under-constrained. Occlusions often make the task even more challenging, and can result in failure if the surface is not sufficiently textured. In this work, we explicitly address the problem of 3D reconstruction of poorly textured, occluded surfaces, proposing a framework based on a template-matching approach that scales dense robust features by a relevancy score. Our approach is extensively compared to current methods employing both local feature matching and dense template alignment. We test on standard datasets as well as on a new dataset (that will be made publicly available) of a sparsely textured, occluded surface. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art results for both well and poorly textured, occluded surfaces.

Template-based Monocular 3D Shape Recovery using Laplacian Meshes

We show that by extending the Laplacian formalism, which was first introduced in the Graphics community to regularize 3D meshes, we can turn the monocular 3D shape reconstruction of a deformable surface given correspondences with a reference image into a much better-posed problem. This allows us to quickly and reliably eliminate outliers by simply solving a linear least squares problem. This yields an initial 3D shape estimate, which is not necessarily accurate, but whose 2D projections are. The initial shape is then refined by a constrained optimization problem to output the final surface reconstruction. Our approach allows us to reduce the dimensionality of the surface reconstruction problem without sacrificing accuracy, thus allowing for real-time implementations.