Towards structure and motion estimation from dynamic silhouettes

Addresses the problem of estimating the structure and motion of a smooth curved object from its silhouettes observed over time by a trinocular imagery. We first construct a model for the local structure along the silhouette for each frame in the temporal sequence. The local models are then integrated into a global surface description by estimating the motion between successive frames. The algorithm tracks certain surface and image features (parabolic points and silhouette inflections, frontier points) which are used to bootstrap the motion estimation process. The whole silhouette is then used to refine the initial motion estimate. We have implemented the proposed approach and report preliminary results