Surface Reconstruction of Rotating Objects from Monocular Video

The ability to model 3D objects from monocular video allows for a number of very useful applications, for instance: 3D face recognition, fast prototyping and entertainment. At present there are a number of methods available for 3D modelling from this and similar data. However many of them are either not robust when presented with real world data, or tend to bias their results to a prior model. Here we use energy minimisation of a restricted circular motion model to recover the 3D shape of an object from video of it rotating. The robustness of the algorithm to noise in the data and deviations from the assumed motion is tested and a 3D model of a real polystyrene head is created.