Event Location: CANCELED
Bio: Yaser Sheikh is an Assistant Research Professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His research is in computer vision, primarily in analyzing dynamic scene including human activity analysis, dynamic scene reconstruction, mobile camera networks, and nonrigid motion estimation. He obtained his doctoral degree from the
University of Central Florida in 2006 and is a recipient of the Hillman award for excellence in computer science research.

Abstract: In factorization approaches to nonrigid structure from motion, the 3D shape of a deforming object is usually modeled as a linear combination of a small number of basis shapes. The original approach to simultaneously estimate the shape basis and nonrigid structure exploited orthonormality constraints for metric rectification. Recently, it has been asserted that structure recovery through orthonormality constraints alone is inherently ambiguous and cannot result in a unique solution. This assertion has been accepted as conventional wisdom and is the justification of many remedial heuristics in literature. In this talk, recent results in the community will be consolidated to show that orthonormality constraints are, in fact, sufficient to recover the 3D structure from image observations alone. The true nature of the ambiguity in using orthonormality constraints for the shape basis will be characterized and will be shown to have no impact on structure reconstruction.