Real-time non-rigid surface detection

We present a real-time method for detecting deformable surfaces, with no need whatsoever for a priori pose knowledge. Our method starts from a set of wide baseline point matches between an undeformed image of the object and the image in which it is to be detected. The matches are used not only to detect but also to compute a precise mapping from one to the other. The algorithm is robust to large deformations, lighting changes, motion blur, and occlusions. It runs at 10 frames per second on a 2.8 GHz PC and we are not aware of any other published technique that produces similar results. Introducing deformable meshes, along with a well designed robust estimator, is the key to dealing with the large number of parameters involved in modeling deformable surfaces and rejecting erroneous matches for error rates of up to 95%, which is considerably more than what is required in practice.