3D Shape and Pose Estimation of Deformable Tapes from Multiple Views

In this paper, we propose a method to estimate 3D shape of deformable plastic tapes from multiple camera images. In this method, the tape is modeled as serial connection of multiple rectangular plates, where the size of each plate is previously known and node angles of between plates represent the shape of the object. The node angles of the object are estimated by 2D silhouette shapes taken in the multiple images. The estimation is performed by minimizing the difference of the silhouette shapes between the input images and synthesized images of the model shape. For demonstrating the proposed method, 3D shape of a tape is estimated with two camera images. The accuracy of the estimation is sufficient for making the assembling robot in our plant to handle the tape. Computation time is also sufficiently short for applying the proposed algorithm in the assembling plant.