BMVA technical meeting: Dynamic Scene Reconstruction

Michael Zollhöfer started proceedings, presenting the achievements of his group at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in real-time reconstruction, making the case for the importance of real-time performance for VR/AR applications. This included the parameterised face model behind the famous face2face demo featuring George W. Bush and others, enabling real-time reconstruction and re-targeting from monocular video. Many other impressive results were also presented including hand/object tracking from RGB-D, reconstruction of non-rigid deformable objects, and large scale scene reconstruction avoiding loop closure issues, again all in real-time. Michael introduced Opt, a programming language developed by the group specifically for these kind of optimizations, which allows energy minimisation problems to be simply defined, and compiled to produce high performance GPU enabled code. This enables rapid development and iteration of research prototypes.