Textureless Deformable Surface Reconstruction with Invisible Markers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel UV-visible fluorescent marker system and multi-camera setup to enable high-quality 3D reconstruction and tracking of textureless deformable surfaces in challenging scenes.

Contribution

The work presents a new marker type and a multi-camera system that significantly improves surface reconstruction and tracking for textureless deformable objects.

Findings

Enables robust 3D reconstruction of textureless surfaces.

Works effectively on complex scenes like hand gestures and cloth.

Markers are invisible under normal light, preserving original appearance.

Abstract

Reconstructing and tracking deformable surface with little or no texture has posed long-standing challenges. Fundamentally, the challenges stem from textureless surfaces lacking features for establishing cross-image correspondences. In this work, we present a novel type of markers to proactively enrich the object's surface features, and thereby ease the 3D surface reconstruction and correspondence tracking. Our markers are made of fluorescent dyes, visible only under the ultraviolet (UV) light and invisible under regular lighting condition. Leveraging the markers, we design a multi-camera system that captures surface deformation under the UV light and the visible light in a time multiplexing fashion. Under the UV light, markers on the object emerge to enrich its surface texture, allowing high-quality 3D shape reconstruction and tracking. Under the visible light, markers become invisible, allowing us to capture the object's original untouched appearance. We perform experiments on various challenging scenes, including hand gestures, facial expressions, waving cloth, and hand-object interaction. In all these cases, we demonstrate that our system is able to produce robust, high-quality 3D reconstruction and tracking.