Dense Non-rigid Structure-from-Motion Made Easy - A Spatial-Temporal Smoothness based Solution

Abstract: This paper proposes a simple spatial-temporal smoothness based method for solving dense non-rigid structure-from-motion (NRSfM). First, we revisit the temporal smoothness and demonstrate that it can be extended to dense case directly. Second, we propose to exploit the spatial smoothness by resorting to the Laplacian of the 3D non-rigid shape. Third, to handle real world noise and outliers in measurements, we robustify the data term by using the $L_1$ norm. In this way, our method could robustly exploit both spatial and temporal smoothness effectively and make dense non-rigid reconstruction easy. Our method is very easy to implement, which involves solving a series of least squares problems. Experimental results on both synthetic and real image dense NRSfM tasks show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art dense non-rigid reconstruction methods.