Flexible Shape Models (FSMs), have been widely used for modelling shape variations of deformable objects [4]. A major limitation of this approach is that it assumes a near fronto-parallel view. Recently, representing images as a Linear Combination of Views (LCV) has become a popular approach for modelling 3D pose variations in a 2D image context (e.g. [7]). This technique, however, only works for images of rigid objects. Apart from explicit 3D model approaches, most previous models that can cope with both shape and pose variations have either used a relationship between pose and shape parameters (e.g. [3]) or modelled the pose variations as variations in shape (e.g. FSMs [4]). However, variations of an object's pose and shape are extrinsic and intrinsic degrees of freedom, respectively. The two should, therefore, not be confounded since they are independent and, in general, not correlated. We have, therefore, developed an integrated approach that uses a coupled-view FSM [3] to re...
M. Benjamin Dias, Bernard F. Buxton