Articulated and elastic non-rigid motion: a review

Motion of physical objects is non-rigid, in general. Most researchers have focused on the study of the motion and structure of rigid objects because of its simplicity and elegance. Recently, investigation of non-rigid structure and motion transformation has drawn the attention of researchers from a wide spectrum of disciplines. Since the non-rigid motion class encompasses a huge domain, we restrict our overview to the motion analysis of articulated and elastic non-rigid objects. Numerous approaches that have been proposed to recover the 3D structure and motion of objects are studied. The discussion includes both: 1) motion recovery without shape models, and 2) model-based analysis, and covers a number of examples of real world objects.>