Progress in arbitrary topology deformable surfaces

Most deformable surfaces used in computer vision are restricted to a simple underlying mesh topology. This is a considerable limitation when dealing with complicated objects whose topology is not known in advance. In previous work we introduced a deformable surface that can take on arbitrary topology while maintaining geometric continuity throughout. In this paper we present some recent advances we have made that enable faster computation and a principled evaluation of the data t-ting term. The method is used to obtain more compact representations for dense polygonal meshes obtained from multiple range images. We show results using a new approach to initialise the mesh topology.