Neural Non Rigid Tracking
Aljaž Božič1     Pablo Palafox1     Michael Zollhöfer2     Angela Dai1     Justus Thies1     Matthias Nießner1    
    1Technical University of Munich     2Meta
Proc. Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2020
Abstract

We introduce a novel, end-to-end learnable, differentiable non-rigid tracker that enables state-of-the-art non-rigid reconstruction. Given two input RGB-D frames of a non-rigidly moving object, we employ a convolutional neural network to predict dense correspondences. These correspondences are used as constraints in an as-rigid-as-possible (ARAP) optimization problem. By enabling gradient back-propagation through the non-rigid optimization solver, we are able to learn correspondences in an end-to-end manner such that they are optimal for the task of non-rigid tracking. Furthermore, this formulation allows for learning correspondence weights in a self-supervised manner. Thus, outliers and wrong correspondences are down-weighted to enable robust tracking. Compared to state-of-the-art approaches, our algorithm shows improved reconstruction performance, while simultaneously achieving 85x faster correspondence prediction than comparable deep-learning based methods.