Temporal Surface Tracking Using Mesh Evolution

In this paper, we address the problem of surface tracking in multiple camera environments and over time sequences. In order to fully track a surface undergoing significant deformations, we cast the problem as a mesh evolution over time. Such an evolution is driven by 3D displacement fields estimated between meshes recovered independently at different time frames. Geometric and photometric information is used to identify a robust set of matching vertices. This provides a sparse displacement field that is densified over the mesh by Laplacian diffusion. In contrast to existing approaches that evolve meshes, we do not assume a known model or a fixed topology. The contribution is a novel mesh evolution based framework that allows to fully track, over long sequences, an unknown surface encountering deformations, including topological changes. Results on very challenging and publicly available image based 3D mesh sequences demonstrate the ability of our framework to efficiently recover surface motions .