Finite Element Based Tracking of Deforming Surfaces

TL;DR

This paper introduces a finite element-based method for tracking deforming surfaces from point clouds, effectively reconstructing both observed and unobserved sides of objects under various noise conditions.

Contribution

It combines prior geometric information with finite element modeling to accurately track complex deformations from single-view point cloud data.

Findings

Effective on noisy low-quality point clouds

Capable of handling large non-linear deformations

Works with data from stereo and depth cameras

Abstract

We present an approach to robustly track the geometry of an object that deforms over time from a set of input point clouds captured from a single viewpoint. The deformations we consider are caused by applying forces to known locations on the object's surface. Our method combines the use of prior information on the geometry of the object modeled by a smooth template and the use of a linear finite element method to predict the deformation. This allows the accurate reconstruction of both the observed and the unobserved sides of the object. We present tracking results for noisy low-quality point clouds acquired by either a stereo camera or a depth camera, and simulations with point clouds corrupted by different error terms. We show that our method is also applicable to large non-linear deformations.