Soft Inextensibility Constraints for Template-Free Non-Rigid Reconstruction

Abstract

In this paper, we exploit an inextensibility prior as a way to better constrain the highly ambiguous problem of non-rigid reconstruction from monocular views. While this widely applicable prior has been used before combined with the strong assumption of a known 3D-template, our work achieves template-free reconstruction using only inextensibility constraints. We show how to formulate an energy function that includes soft inextensibility constraints and rely on existing discrete optimisation methods to minimise it. Our method has all of the following advantages: (i) it can be applied to two tasks that have been so far considered independently – template based reconstruction and non-rigid structure from motion – producing comparable or better results than the state-of-the art methods; (ii) it can perform template-free reconstruction from as few as two images; and (iii) it does not require post-processing stitching or surface smoothing.