Section: Overall Objectives

Overall Objectives

Figure 1. Dynamic Geometry Modeling

MORPHEO's ambition is to perceive and to interpret shapes that move using multiple camera systems. Departing from standard motion capture systems, based on markers, that provide only sparse information on moving shapes, multiple camera systems allow dense information on both shapes and their motion to be recovered from visual cues. Such ability to perceive shapes in motion brings a rich domain for research investigations on how to model, understand and animate real dynamic shapes, and finds applications, for instance, in gait analysis, bio-metric and bio-mechanical analysis, animation, games and, more insistently in recent years, in the virtual and augmented reality domain. The MORPHEO team particularly focuses on three different axes within the overall theme of 3D dynamic scene vision or 4D vision:

1. Shape and appearance models: how to build precise geometric and photometric models of shapes, including human bodies but not limited to, given temporal sequences.

2. Dynamic shape vision: how to register and track moving shapes, build pose spaces and animate captured shapes.

3. Inside shape vision: how to capture and model inside parts of moving shapes using combined color and X-ray imaging.

The strategy developed by MORPHEO to address the mentioned challenges is based on methodological tools that include in particular geometry, Bayesian inference and numerical optimization. Following the evolution in computer vision, our strategy has also evolved towards data driven approaches, as they have proved to be beneficial on different components of 3D vision solutions. Thus, our methodology include now machine learning tools whose potential in 4D vision is still to be fully investigated.