Towards 3D motion estimation from deformable surfaces

Estimating the pose of an imaging sensor is a central research problem. Many solutions have been proposed for the case of a rigid environment. In contrast, we tackle the case of a non-rigid environment observed by a 3D sensor, which has been neglected in the literature. We represent the environment as sets of time-varying 3D points explained by a low-rank shape model, that we derive in its implicit and explicit forms. The parameters of this model are learnt from data gathered by the 3D sensor. We propose a learning algorithm based on minimal 3D non-rigid tensors that we introduce. This is followed by a maximum likelihood nonlinear refinement performed in a bundle adjustment manner. Given the learnt environment model, we compute the pose of the 3D sensor, as well as the deformations of the environment, that is, the non-rigid counterpart of pose, from new sets of 3D points. We validate our environment learning and pose estimation modules on simulated and real data