3-D Shape Recovery Using A Deformable Model

This paper describes a method for recovering the 3D shape of a moving object from a sequence of images. While following the motion of the object, a 3D surface model, initialized to be spherical, progressively deforms under the action of simulated external forces driving its profile towards the object profile extracted from the image. Internal forces coupled to the model encourage the surface to be smooth and to deform smoothly at each time step. The model is aligned with the object in 3D by rotating on the ground plane to orientate parallel to the back-projected motion trajectory and translating to minimize the distance between the model profile and the object profile. Experimental results are presented for the recovery of shape models of vehicles