Textureless Deformable Surface Reconstruction with Invisible Markers
This addresses a long-standing challenge in computer vision for applications like hand gestures and facial expressions, though it is incremental as it builds on marker-based methods with a novel twist.
The paper tackled the problem of reconstructing and tracking deformable surfaces with little or no texture by introducing fluorescent markers visible only under UV light, enabling high-quality 3D shape reconstruction and tracking while preserving the object's original appearance under visible light.
Reconstructing and tracking deformable surface with little or no texture has posed long-standing challenges. Fundamentally, the challenges stem from textureless surfaces lacking features for establishing cross-image correspondences. In this work, we present a novel type of markers to proactively enrich the object's surface features, and thereby ease the 3D surface reconstruction and correspondence tracking. Our markers are made of fluorescent dyes, visible only under the ultraviolet (UV) light and invisible under regular lighting condition. Leveraging the markers, we design a multi-camera system that captures surface deformation under the UV light and the visible light in a time multiplexing fashion. Under the UV light, markers on the object emerge to enrich its surface texture, allowing high-quality 3D shape reconstruction and tracking. Under the visible light, markers become invisible, allowing us to capture the object's original untouched appearance. We perform experiments on various challenging scenes, including hand gestures, facial expressions, waving cloth, and hand-object interaction. In all these cases, we demonstrate that our system is able to produce robust, high-quality 3D reconstruction and tracking.