From active appearance models and mnemonic descent to 3d morphable models: A brief history of statistical deformable models with examples in menpo

Construction and fitting of Statistical Deformable Models (SDM) is in the core of computer vision and image analysis discipline. It can be used to estimate the object's shape, pose, parts and landmarks using only static imagery captured from monocular cameras. One of the first and most popular families of SDMs is that of Active Appearance Models. AAM uses a generative parameterization of object appearance and shape. The fitting process of AAMs is usually conducted by solving a non-linear optimization problem. In this talk I will start with a brief introduction to AAMs and I will continue with describing supervised methods for AAM fitting. Subsequently, under this framework, I will motivate current techniques developed in my group that capitalize on the combined power of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) and Recurrent NN (RNNs) for optimal deformable object modeling and fitting. Finally, I will show how we can extract dense shape of objects by building and fitting 3D Morphable Models. Examples will be given in the publicly available toolbox of my group called Menpo (http://www.menpo.org/).