Scalable Dense Non-rigid Structure-from-Motion: A Grassmannian Perspective

This paper addresses the task of dense non-rigid structure-from-motion (NRSfM) using multiple images. State-of-the-art methods to this problem are often hurdled by scalability, expensive computations, and noisy measurements. Further, recent methods to NRSfM usually either assume a small number of sparse feature points or ignore local non-linearities of shape deformations, and thus cannot reliably model complex non-rigid deformations. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a new approach for dense NRSfM by modeling the problem on a Grassmann manifold. Specifically, we assume the complex non-rigid deformations lie on a union of local linear subspaces both spatially and temporally. This naturally allows for a compact representation of the complex non-rigid deformation over frames. We provide experimental results on several synthetic and real benchmark datasets. The procured results clearly demonstrate that our method, apart from being scalable and more accurate than state-of-the-art methods, is also more robust to noise and generalizes to highly non-linear deformations.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure, 4 tables. Accepted for publication in Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018, typos fixed and acknowledgement adde

Learning to Reconstruct Texture-less Deformable Surfaces from a Single View

Recent years have seen the development of mature solutions for reconstructing deformable surfaces from a single image, provided that they are relatively well-textured. By contrast, recovering the 3D shape of texture-less surfaces remains an open problem, and essentially relates to Shape-from-Shading. In this paper, we introduce a data-driven approach to this problem. We introduce a general framework that can predict diverse 3D representations, such as meshes, normals, and depth maps. Our experiments show that meshes are ill-suited to handle texture-less 3D reconstruction in our context. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our approach generalizes well to unseen objects, and that it yields higher-quality reconstructions than a state-of-the-art SfS technique, particularly in terms of normal estimates. Our reconstructions accurately model the fine details of the surfaces, such as the creases of a T-Shirt worn by a person.Comment: Accepted to 3DV 201

MonoPerfCap: Human Performance Capture from Monocular Video

We present the first marker-less approach for temporally coherent 3D performance capture of a human with general clothing from monocular video. Our approach reconstructs articulated human skeleton motion as well as medium-scale non-rigid surface deformations in general scenes. Human performance capture is a challenging problem due to the large range of articulation, potentially fast motion, and considerable non-rigid deformations, even from multi-view data. Reconstruction from monocular video alone is drastically more challenging, since strong occlusions and the inherent depth ambiguity lead to a highly ill-posed reconstruction problem. We tackle these challenges by a novel approach that employs sparse 2D and 3D human pose detections from a convolutional neural network using a batch-based pose estimation strategy. Joint recovery of per-batch motion allows to resolve the ambiguities of the monocular reconstruction problem based on a low dimensional trajectory subspace. In addition, we propose refinement of the surface geometry based on fully automatically extracted silhouettes to enable medium-scale non-rigid alignment. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance capture results that enable exciting applications such as video editing and free viewpoint video, previously infeasible from monocular video. Our qualitative and quantitative evaluation demonstrates that our approach significantly outperforms previous monocular methods in terms of accuracy, robustness and scene complexity that can be handled.Comment: Accepted to ACM TOG 2018, to be presented on SIGGRAPH 201

LiveCap: Real-time Human Performance Capture from Monocular Video

We present the first real-time human performance capture approach that reconstructs dense, space-time coherent deforming geometry of entire humans in general everyday clothing from just a single RGB video. We propose a novel two-stage analysis-by-synthesis optimization whose formulation and implementation are designed for high performance. In the first stage, a skinned template model is jointly fitted to background subtracted input video, 2D and 3D skeleton joint positions found using a deep neural network, and a set of sparse facial landmark detections. In the second stage, dense non-rigid 3D deformations of skin and even loose apparel are captured based on a novel real-time capable algorithm for non-rigid tracking using dense photometric and silhouette constraints. Our novel energy formulation leverages automatically identified material regions on the template to model the differing non-rigid deformation behavior of skin and apparel. The two resulting non-linear optimization problems per-frame are solved with specially-tailored data-parallel Gauss-Newton solvers. In order to achieve real-time performance of over 25Hz, we design a pipelined parallel architecture using the CPU and two commodity GPUs. Our method is the first real-time monocular approach for full-body performance capture. Our method yields comparable accuracy with off-line performance capture techniques, while being orders of magnitude faster

Shape basis interpretation for monocular deformable 3D reconstruction

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.In this paper, we propose a novel interpretable shape model to encode object non-rigidity. We first use the initial frames of a monocular video to recover a rest shape, used later to compute a dissimilarity measure based on a distance matrix measurement. Spectral analysis is then applied to this matrix to obtain a reduced shape basis, that in contrast to existing approaches, can be physically interpreted. In turn, these pre-computed shape bases are used to linearly span the deformation of a wide variety of objects. We introduce the low-rank basis into a sequential approach to recover both camera motion and non-rigid shape from the monocular video, by simply optimizing the weights of the linear combination using bundle adjustment. Since the number of parameters to optimize per frame is relatively small, specially when physical priors are considered, our approach is fast and can potentially run in real time. Validation is done in a wide variety of real-world objects, undergoing both inextensible and extensible deformations. Our approach achieves remarkable robustness to artifacts such as noisy and missing measurements and shows an improved performance to competing methods.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft