Image Registration by Combining Thin-Plate Splines with a 3D Morphable Model

Registering images of a deforming surface is a well-studied problem. It is common practice to describe the image deformation fields with thin-plate splines. This has the advantage to involve small numbers of parameters, but has the drawback that the 3D surface is not explicitly reconstructed. We propose an image deformation model combining thin-plate splines with 3D entities-a 3D control mesh and a camera-overcoming the above mentioned drawback. An original solution to the non-rigid image registration problem using this model is proposed and demonstrated on simulated and real data.