Model-based nonrigid motion recovery from sequences of range images without point correspondences

In this paper we propose a new method for accurate nonrigid motion analysis when point correspondence data is not available. We construct nonlinear finite element models by integrating range data and prior knowledge about an object's properties. We attempt to recover the motion sequence given an initial alignment of the model with the first frame of the sequence. The main idea of the method is to find the forces that are responsible for the motion or shape deformation of the given object. The task is broken into subtasks of finding the forces for each frame. Both absolute values and directions of these forces are taken into consideration and iteratively varied not only for each frame, but also between the frames. Our work demonstrates the possibility of accurate nonrigid motion analysis and force recovery from range image sequences containing nonrigid objects and large motion without interframe point correspondences.