Nonrigid structure-from-motion: estimating shape and motion with hierarchical Priors

This paper describes methods for recovering time-varying shape and motion of non-rigid 3D objects from uncalibrated 2D point tracks. For example, given a video recording of a talking person, we would like to estimate the 3D shape of the face at each instant, and learn a model of facial deformation. Time-varying shape is modeled as a rigid transformation combined with a non-rigid deformation. Reconstruction is ill-posed if arbitrary deformations are allowed, and thus additional assumptions about deformations are required. We first suggest restricting shapes to lie within a low-dimensional subspace, and describe estimation algorithms. However, this restriction alone is insufficient to constrain reconstruction. To address these problems, we propose a reconstruction method using a Probabilistic Principal Components Analysis (PPCA) shape model, and an estimation algorithm that simultaneously estimates 3D shape and motion for each instant, learns the PPCA model parameters, and robustly fills-in missing data points. We then extend the model to model temporal dynamics in object shape, allowing the algorithm to robustly handle severe cases of missing data.     

基于多个关键点对应性的手部动态重建

提出了一种新的基于单视图深度序列的手部运动跟踪和表面重建方法。在假设任 意一对关键点的对应性在所有手部姿态上均一致基础上,使用一个平滑的手部网格模板来提供 形状和拓扑先验,引入多个能量函数构造输入扫描与模板之间三维关键点到关键点的对应性, 并将其整合到一个可用的非刚性配准管线中,以实现精确的表面拟合。通过最小化手部模板和 输入深度图像序列之间的误差来捕获非刚性的手部运动。采用迭代求解的方法,通过显式的关 键点到关键点之间的对应性,逐步细化手部关节区域的变形,从而达到快速收敛和合理变形的 目的。在含有噪声的手部深度图像序列上的大量实验表明,该方法能够重建精确的手部运动, 并且对较大的变形和遮挡具有鲁棒性。     

SR-SIHKS：一种非刚体全局形状特征

非刚体由于姿态变化会产出多样的形变,因此非刚体的形状检索比刚体更具挑战性。形状特征提取是非刚体三维模型形状检索的关键问题。为了提高非刚体形状检索的准确度,提出了一种非刚体全局形状特征提取方法。此方法的核心思想是将稀疏表示（Sparse Representation,SR）理论用于对尺度无关的热核特征（Scale Invariant Heat Kernel Signature,SIHKS）进行稀疏编码,因此被称为SR-SIHKS。改进了SIHKS局部特征的提取方法,根据所处理的模型库来自适应地确定热扩散时间参数;采用K-SVD算法来训练字典,借助Batch-OMP算法实现局部特征的稀疏编码;将非刚体三维模型的所有局部特征的稀疏编码汇聚为全局形状特征。实验结果表明,SR-SIHKS具有比SIHKS和HKS更优的检索效果。     

A methodology for shape matching of non-rigid structures based on integrated graphical information

Shape matching is a long-studied problem and lies at the core of many applications in statistical shape analysis, virtual reality and human–computer interaction. This paper presents an automatic dense correspondence method to match the mesh vertices of two 3D shapes under near-isometric and non-rigid deformations. The goal is achieved by combining three types of graphic structure information. The method includes three major steps: first, we describe the vertices based on three types of graphical information, Euclidean structure information, Riemannian structure information, and conformal structure information; second, the match between two shapes is formulated as an optimization problem and a novel objective function is proposed; third, we resolve the optimal solution by using the projected descent optimization procedure to solve the objective function. The method is tested on various shape pairs with different poses, surface details, and topological noises. We demonstrate the performance of our approach through an extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluation on several challenging 3D shape matching datasets where we achieve superior performance to existing methods.     

Almost invariant subspaces: An approach to high gain feedback design--Part II: Almost conditionally invariant subspaces

In Part I of this paper, almost controlled invariant subspaces were studied. In this part we will consider their duals, the almost conditionally invariant subspaces. These concepts give immediately by dualization of the almost disturbance decoupling control by state feedback the solution of the almost disturbance decoupled estimation problem. Finally, we consider the problem of approximate disturbance decoupling by measurement feedback and it is shown that this problem is solvable to any arbitrary degree of accuracy if and only if: 1) almost disturbance decoupling by state feedback, and 2) almost disturbance decoupled estimation of the to-be-controlled output are both possible.     

基于微分几何的带钢热连轧活套解耦控制

带钢热连轧机活套系统是一个耦合的多输入多输出的非线性系统。针对活套系统的解耦控制问题,提出了基于微分几何的解耦控制方法。微分几何方法利用微分几何中的局部变换来研究系统的基本特性,是处理非线性多变量系统解耦问题的有效数学工具;建立了活套系统的数学模型,利用微分几何方法,通过非线性状态反馈对热连轧活套进行了解耦控制,并针对活套系统实例进行了仿真研究。仿真结果表明,该控制算法具有较好的解耦效果,有效地提高了活套系统的控制效果。     

Robust deformable shape reconstruction from monocular video with manifold forests

Existing approaches to recover structure of 3D deformable objects and camera motion parameters from an uncalibrated images assume the object’s shape could be modelled well by a linear subspace. These methods have been proven effective and well suited when the deformations are relatively small, but fail to reconstruct the objects with relatively large deformations. This paper describes a novel approach for 3D non-rigid shape reconstruction, based on manifold decision forest technique. The use of this technique can be justified by noting that a specific type of shape variations might be governed by only a small number of parameters, and therefore can be well represented in a low-dimensional manifold. The key contributions of this work are the use of random decision forests for the shape manifold learning and robust metric for calculation of the re-projection error. The learned manifold defines constraints imposed on the reconstructed shapes. Due to a nonlinear structure of the learned manifold, this approach is more suitable to deal with large and complex object deformations when compared to the linear constraints. The robust metric is applied to reduce the effect of measurement outliers on the quality of the reconstruction. In many practical applications outliers cannot be completely removed and therefore the use of robust techniques is of particular practical interest. The proposed method is validated on 2D points sequences projected from the 3D motion capture data for ground truth comparison and also on real 2D video sequences. Experiments show that the newly proposed method provides better performance compared to previously proposed ones, including the robustness with respect to measurement noise, missing measurements and outliers present in the data.     

Nonlinear free bending vibrations of plates

A general solution for the Helmholtz differential equations is obtained in the complex domain and applied to the nonlinear, free, bending vibrations of plates. The analysis is based on the decoupled nonlinear von Karman field equations by Berger assumption for the large deformations of plates. The decoupled differential equation in terms of the deflection function is a fourth order Helmholtz differential equation. Its solution, called the dynamic deflection function, is obtained in the complex domain by means of newly defined first and second kind and modified Bessel functions. The dynamic deflection function can be applied to any plates having any shape and any boundary condition under any arbitrary dynamic loads. For plates with smooth boundary, the parameters of the dynamic deflection function are determined from the boundary conditions of the plates and the initial conditions of the vibrations. The analyses of plates with piece-wise smooth boundaries are obtained on the mapped planes. The nonlinear, free vibration of circular plates are investigated by the dynamic deflection function. The effect of stretching on the natural circular frequencies are illustrated.     

Fast Blended Transformations for Partial Shape Registration

Automatic estimation of skinning transformations is a popular way to deform a single reference shape into a new pose by providing a small number of control parameters. We generalize this approach by efficiently enabling the use of multiple exemplar shapes. Using a small set of representative natural poses, we propose to express an unseen appearance by a low-dimensional linear subspace, specified by a redundant dictionary of weighted vertex positions. Minimizing a nonlinear functional that regulates the example manifold, the suggested approach supports local-rigid deformations of articulated objects, as well as nearly isometric embeddings of smooth shapes. A real-time nonrigid deformation system is demonstrated, and a shape completion and partial registration framework is introduced. These applications can recover a target pose and implicit inverse kinematics from a small number of examples and just a few vertex positions. The resulting reconstruction is more accurate compared to alternative reduced deformable models.     

Status of noninteracting control

The current status of decoupling theory for linear constant multivariable systems is described. The subject is treated in vector space terms and appropriate background concepts including invariant and controllability subspaces are discussed. Suggestions are given for translating vector space operations into matrix operations suitable for computation. The controllability subspace is used to formulate the restricted (static compensation) decoupling problem. Although the most general version of this problem is unsolved, there are known solutions for three special cases. A complete solution to the extended (dynamic compensation) decoupling problem is known. If a linear constant multivariable system can be decoupled at all, by any means whatever, then it can always be decoupled using linear dynamic compensation. The internal structure of a decoupled system is described in simple matrix terms. Using this representation, it is possible to characterize the system pole distributions which may be achieved while preserving a decoupled structure. A procedure is outlined for synthesizing a dynamic compensator of low order which will decouple a system. The procedure actually provides minimal order decoupling compensators for systems in which the number of open-loop inputs equal the number of outputs to be controlled.     

非线性控制系统与状态空间的几何结构

首行从整体化的观点定义了一种建立在黎曼流形上的非线性控制系统,给出了系统的状态方程在黎曼流形的局部坐标系下的表达式,讨论了黎曼流形的几何结构对非线性系统的影响,研究了非线性系统的能控性和能观测性,其次,利用对合分布与全测地子流形的性质,给出了建立在黎曼流形上的非线性系统的局部能控结构分解,局部能观结构分解和Kalman分解,第三,分别利用彼此正交的对合分布族和递增对合分布族与全测地子流形族的性质。研究了建立在黎曼流形上的非线性控制系统平等解耦问题和级联解耦问题,以及仿射非线性控制系统的局部干扰解耦问题。     

Feature-Preserved 3D Canonical Form

Measuring the dissimilarity between non-rigid objects is a challenging problem in 3D shape retrieval. One potential solution is to construct the models’ 3D canonical forms (i.e., isometry-invariant representations in 3D Euclidean space) on which any rigid shape matching algorithm can be applied. However, existing methods, which are typically based on embedding procedures, result in greatly distorted canonical forms, and thus could not provide satisfactory performance to distinguish non-rigid models. In this paper, we present a feature-preserved canonical form for non-rigid 3D watertight meshes. The basic idea is to naturally deform original models against corresponding initial canonical forms calculated by Multidimensional Scaling (MDS). Specifically, objects are first segmented into near-rigid subparts, and then, through properly-designed rotations and translations, original subparts are transformed into poses that correspond well with their positions and directions on MDS canonical forms. Final results are obtained by solving nonlinear minimization problems for optimal alignments and smoothing boundaries between subparts. Experiments on two non-rigid 3D shape benchmarks not only clearly verify the advantages of our algorithm against existing approaches, but also demonstrate that, with the help of the proposed canonical form, we can obtain significantly better retrieval accuracy compared to the state of the art.     

An Elasticity-Based Covariance Analysis of Shapes

We introduce the covariance of a number of given shapes if they are interpreted as boundary contours of elastic objects. Based on the notion of nonlinear elastic deformations from one shape to another, a suitable linearization of geometric shape variations is introduced. Once such a linearization is available, a principal component analysis can be investigated. This requires the definition of a covariance metric—an inner product on linearized shape variations. The resulting covariance operator robustly captures strongly nonlinear geometric variations in a physically meaningful way and allows to extract the dominant modes of shape variation. The underlying elasticity concept represents an alternative to Riemannian shape statistics. In this paper we compare a standard L ²-type covariance metric with a metric based on the Hessian of the nonlinear elastic energy. Furthermore, we explore the dependence of the principal component analysis on the type of the underlying nonlinear elasticity. For the built-in pairwise elastic registration, a relaxed model formulation is employed which allows for a non-exact matching. Shape contours are approximated by single well phase fields, which enables an extension of the method to a covariance analysis of image morphologies. The model is implemented with multilinear finite elements embedded in a multi-scale approach. The characteristics of the approach are demonstrated on a number of illustrative and real world examples in 2D and 3D.     

Active Disturbance Rejection Control System Design for a Morphing Wing Structure

Control system design for a morphing wing structure, which is proposed by NextGen Aeronautics, Inc., is investigated in this paper. The dynamic model of the morphing wing, developed based on the Euler‐Lagrange equation, is nonlinear, multivariable coupled, over‐actuated and uncertain. The allocation‐decoupling controller is designed based on control efficiency and decoupling matrices. For each decoupled subsystem, nonlinear and linear active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) systems are designed and compared. The time‐optimal property and the convergence of nonlinear ADRC are analyzed theoretically based on the isochronic region and Lyapunov theories. The simulation results of the developed control systems show satisfactory performances of decoupling and extreme tolerance of internal uncertainty and external disturbance. The comparison of nonlinear and linear ADRC systems demonstrate that the nonlinear system can provide a little better performance while the linear system can greatly simplify the design procedure. The results indicate that, the methods of control system design proposed in this paper are practical and effective for motion control of complex uncertain dynamical systems.     

On Shape of Plane Elastic Curves

We study shapes of planar arcs and closed contours modeled on elastic curves obtained by bending, stretching or compressing line segments non-uniformly along their extensions. Shapes are represented as elements of a quotient space of curves obtained by identifying those that differ by shape-preserving transformations. The elastic properties of the curves are encoded in Riemannian metrics on these spaces. Geodesics in shape spaces are used to quantify shape divergence and to develop morphing techniques. The shape spaces and metrics constructed are novel and offer an environment for the study of shape statistics. Elasticity leads to shape correspondences and deformations that are more natural and intuitive than those obtained in several existing models. Applications of shape geodesics to the definition and calculation of mean shapes and to the development of shape clustering techniques are also investigated.     

A Bayesian approach to simultaneously recover camera pose and non-rigid shape from monocular images

In this paper we bring the tools of the Simultaneous Localization and Map Building (SLAM) problem from a rigid to a deformable domain and use them to simultaneously recover the 3D shape of non-rigid surfaces and the sequence of poses of a moving camera. Under the assumption that the surface shape may be represented as a weighted sum of deformation modes, we show that the problem of estimating the modal weights along with the camera poses, can be probabilistically formulated as a maximum a posteriori estimate and solved using an iterative least squares optimization. In addition, the probabilistic formulation we propose is very general and allows introducing different constraints without requiring any extra complexity. As a proof of concept, we show that local inextensibility constraints that prevent the surface from stretching can be easily integrated.An extensive evaluation on synthetic and real data, demonstrates that our method has several advantages over current non-rigid shape from motion approaches. In particular, we show that our solution is robust to large amounts of noise and outliers and that it does not need to track points over the whole sequence nor to use an initialization close from the ground truth.     

A Review of: “Fuzzy Sets and Their Applications”. By C. V. NEGOIT[Abreve] and D. A. RALESCU. (In Rumanian) (Bucharest: Editura Technica, 1974.) [Pp.219.]

This paper presents a new controller for position and force control of robotic devices interacting with passive environments. In this approach, for the manipulator dynamics in joint space, suitable output equations are defined which represent the position control and force control subspaces. The dynamics of the manipulator are projected along these subspaces to obtain the dynamics in the respective subspaces. The resulting dynamics are linearized and decoupled using a nonlinear input-state linearizing controller. For the position control subspace dynamics, desirable stability features are achieved through pole placement design. Along the force control subspace, a soft base is introduced, the compliance effect of which is controlled by an appropriate compensation term. Based on the force feedback information, this compensation is modifed online using an extended dynamics. Assuming a model of the passive environment, aspects of local stability of the controller have been discussed. The theory has been presented for a two-link planar manipulator example, based on which, a numerical simulation is discussed.     

A factorization-based approach for articulated nonrigid shape, motion and kinematic chain recovery from video

Recovering articulated shape and motion, especially human body motion, from video is a challenging problem with a wide range of applications in medical study, sport analysis and animation, etc. Previous work on articulated motion recovery generally requires prior knowledge of the kinematic chain and usually does not concern the recovery of the articulated shape. The non-rigidity of some articulated part, e.g. human body motion with nonrigid facial motion, is completely ignored. We propose a factorization-based approach to recover the shape, motion and kinematic chain of an articulated object with nonrigid parts altogether directly from video sequences under a unified framework. The proposed approach is based on our modeling of the articulated non-rigid motion as a set of intersecting motion subspaces. A motion subspace is the linear subspace of the trajectories of an object. It can model a rigid or non-rigid motion. The intersection of two motion subspaces of linked parts models the motion of an articulated joint or axis. Our approach consists of algorithms for motion segmentation, kinematic chain building, and shape recovery. It handles outliers and can be automated. We test our approach through synthetic and real experiments and demonstrate how to recover articulated structure with non-rigid parts via a single-view camera without prior knowledge of its kinematic chain.     

Enhanced pose normalization and matching of non-rigid objects based on support vector machine modelling

The estimation of 3D surface correspondence constitutes a fundamental problem in shape matching and analysis applications. In the presence of non-rigid shape deformations, the ambiguity of surface correspondence increases together with the complexity of registration algorithms.     

Large deflection electro-mechanical analysis of composite structures bonded with macro-fiber composite actuators considering thermal loads

In this paper, static analysis of laminated composite plates and shells bonded with macro-fiber composite (MFC) actuators under thermo-electro-mechanical loads is considered. Most earlier studies in the literature focused on the effects of MFC actuation power and fiber orientations on shape deformation of composite plates/shells subjected to electrical voltage only. Also most of the earlier studies on MFC-\(\hbox {d}_{33}\) bonded smart structures in literature are performed by commercial softwares like Ansys or Abaqus using the thermal strain equivalent approach to model the piezomechanical coupling. Here, our earlier developed geometrically nonlinear plate and shell finite elements considering finite rotation theory are extended for MFC actuator-bonded composite structures taking into account additionally the response to temperature gradients. An improved Reissner–Mindlin hypothesis is considered to derive the variational formulation, in which a parabolic assumption of transverse shear strains across the thickness is assumed. MFC actuators dominated by the \(\hbox {d}_{33}\) effect (MFC-\(\hbox {d}_{33}\)) with arbitrary fiber orientations are considered. The numerical model is validated with composite beams and plates by comparing the results of simulations with experimental investigations existing in the literature. An angle-ply composite shell structure is studied in detail concerning geometrically nonlinear analysis of bending and twisting deformations under different MFC-\(\hbox {d}_{33}\) fiber orientations under electric loading. Shape control of thermally induced deformations of composite plates and shells is performed using bonded MFC-\(\hbox {d}_{33}\) actuators and the significance of the present geometrically nonlinear model is highlighted.