Generalizing Shape-from-Template to Topological Changes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel Shape-from-Template method capable of handling topological changes like tears and cuts in deformable objects, improving reconstruction accuracy over existing approaches.

Contribution

It extends SfT to account for topological changes by iteratively adapting the template through domain partitioning, a first in the field.

Findings

Robustly captures tears and cuts in 2D surfaces

Outperforms baseline methods on synthetic and real data

Establishes a general framework for topological-change-aware SfT

Abstract

Reconstructing the surfaces of deformable objects from correspondences between a 3D template and a 2D image is well studied under Shape-from-Template (SfT) methods; however, existing approaches break down when topological changes accompany the deformation. We propose a principled extension of SfT that enables reconstruction in the presence of such changes. Our approach is initialized with a classical SfT solution and iteratively adapts the template by partitioning its spatial domain so as to minimize an energy functional that jointly encodes physical plausibility and reprojection consistency. We demonstrate that the method robustly captures a wide range of practically relevant topological events including tears and cuts on bounded 2D surfaces, thereby establishing the first general framework for topological-change-aware SfT. Experiments on both synthetic and real data confirm that our approach consistently outperforms baseline methods.