Surface Flow from Visual Cues

In this paper we study the estimation of dense, instantaneous 3D motion fields over a non-rigidly moving surface observed by multi-camera systems. The motivation arises from multi-camera applications that require motion information, for arbitrary subjects, in order to perform tasks such as surface tracking or segmentation. To this aim, we present a novel framework that allows to efficiently compute dense 3D displacement fields using low level visual cues and geometric constraints. The main contribution is a unified framework that combines flow constraints for small displacements with temporal feature constraints for large displacements and fuses them over the surface using local rigidity constraints. The resulting linear optimization problem allows for variational solutions and fast implementations. Experiments conducted on synthetic and real data demonstrate the respective roles of flow and feature constraints as well as their ability to provide robust surface motion cues when combined.