Structure and motion of deformable objects from image sequences

An incremental approach to understanding 3-D structure and motion of rigid as well as nonrigid objects from image sequences is presented. To be applicable to natural imagery, the recovery process should meet two requirements: robustness to noise and the ability to cope with deformable objects. These requirements can be met by using a smoothness-of-motion constraint. The smoothness-of-motion constraint provides a framework for temporal integration of motion information over a longer sequence. The 3-D structure and motion information is smoothly and successively updated to agree with the observed transformation in the range. A model of rigid and nonrigid motion is introduced, and the smoothness-of-motion constraint is formulated as a stabilizing function. Some preliminary results are also given