Surface shape reconstruction of an undulating transparent object

An algorithm is described for reconstructing the surface shape of a nonrigid transparent object, such as water, from the apparent motion of the observed pattern. This algorithm is based on the optical and statistical analysis of the distortions. It consists of the following parts: extraction of optical flow, averaging of each point trajectory obtained from the optical flow sequence, calculation of the surface normal using optical characteristics, and reconstruction of the surface. The algorithm is applied to synthetic and real images to demonstrate its performance