Correspondence-Free Material Reconstruction using Sparse Surface Constraints

We present a method to infer physical material parameters, and even external boundaries, from the scanned motion of a homogeneous deformable object via the solution of an inverse problem. Parameters are estimated from real-world data sources such as sparse observations from a Kinect sensor without correspondences. We introduce a novel Lagrangian-Eulerian optimization formulation, including a cost function that penalizes differences to observations during an optimization run. This formulation matches correspondence-free, sparse observations from a single-view depth image with a finite element simulation of deformable bodies. In a number of tests using synthetic datasets and real-world measurements, we analyse the robustness of our approach and the convergence behavior of the numerical optimization scheme.