Section: Scientific Foundations

Surface Deformation

Recovering the temporal evolution of a deformable surface is a fundamental task in computer vision, with a large variety of applications ranging from the motion capture of articulated shapes, such as human bodies, to the deformation of complex surfaces such as clothes. Methods that solve for this problem usually infer surface evolutions from motion or geometric cues. This information can be provided by motion capture systems or one of the numerous available static 3D acquisition modalities. In this inference, methods are faced with the challenging estimation of the time-consistent deformation of a surface from cues that can be sparse and noisy. Such an estimation is an ill posed problem that requires prior knowledge on the deformation to be introduced in order to limit the range of possible solutions.