Non-rigid 3D shape tracking from multiview video

We present a fast and efficient non-rigid shape tracking method for modeling dynamic 3D objects from multiview video. Starting from an initial mesh representation, the shape of a dynamic object is tracked over time, both in geometry and topology, based on multiview silhouette and 3D scene flow information. The mesh representation of each frame is obtained by deforming the mesh representation of the previous frame towards the optimal surface defined by the time-varying multiview silhouette information with the aid of 3D scene flow vectors. The whole time-varying shape is then represented as a mesh sequence which can efficiently be encoded in terms of restructuring and topological operations, and small-scale vertex displacements along with the initial model. The proposed method has the ability to deal with dynamic objects that may undergo non-rigid transformations and topological changes. The time-varying mesh representations of such non-rigid shapes, which are not necessarily of fixed connectivity, can successfully be tracked thanks to restructuring and topological operations employed in our deformation scheme. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed method both on real and synthetic sequences. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.