Group-Valued Regularization for Motion Segmentation of Articulated Shapes

Motion-based segmentation is an important tool for the analysis of articulated shapes. As such, it plays an important role in mechanical engineering, computer graphics, and computer vision. In this chapter, we study motion-based segmentation of 3D articulated shapes. We formulate motion-based surface segmentation as a piecewise-smooth regularization problem for the transformations between several poses. Using Lie-group representation for the transformation at each surface point, we obtain a simple regularized fitting problem. An Ambrosio-Tortorelli scheme of a generalized Mumford-Shah model gives us the segmentation functional without assuming prior knowledge on the number of parts or even the articulated nature of the object. Experiments on several standard datasets compare the results of the proposed method to state-of-the-art algorithms.