Non-Rigid Metric Shape and Motion Recovery from Uncalibrated Images Using Priors

In this paper we focus on the estimation of the 3D Euclidean shape and motion of a non-rigid object which is moving rigidly while deforming and is observed by a perspective camera. Our method exploits the fact that it is often a reasonable assumption that some of the points are deforming throughout the sequence while others remain rigid. First we use an automatic segmentation algorithm to identify the set of rigid points which in turn is used to estimate the internal camera calibration parameters and the overall rigid motion. Finally we formalise the problem of non-rigid shape estimation as a constrained non-linear minimization adding priors on the degree of deformability of each point. We perform experiments on synthetic and real data which show firstly that even when using a minimal set of rigid points it is possible to obtain reliable metric information and secondly that the shape priors help to disambiguate the contribution to the image motion caused by the deformation and the perspective distortion.