A smooth 6DOF motion prior for efficient 3D surface tracking

This paper proposes an efficient method for tracking a 3D surface model, which utilises an accurate neighbourhood motion prior to regularize the solution. Typical 3D motion trackers only estimate the local translations at each point on the surface model, which means that enforcing smooth motion between neighbouring surface points can be difficult when undergoing rigid body motion. This paper uses a patch-based representation of the scene surface so that both translations and rotations can be estimated on the surface, leading to smooth neighbouring scene flows under local rigid body motions. Since the translation and rotation motions are estimated at each patch using a variational approach, the proposed tracker is efficient with relatively few reprojections required at each frame. The proposed method is demonstrated on a real-world multi-camera sequence, and the scene-flow is accurately estimated over ninety frames.