Most recent approaches to monocular non-rigid 3D shape recovery rely on exploiting point correspondences and work best when the whole surface is well-textured. The alternative is to rely either on contours or shading information, which has only been demonstrated in very restrictive settings. Here, we propose a novel approach to monocular deformable shape recovery that can operate under complex lighting and handle partially textured surfaces, whether developable or not. At the heart of our algorithm, are a learned mapping from intensity patterns to the shape of local surface patches and a principled approach to piecing together the resulting local shape estimates. We validate our approach quantitatively and qualitatively using both synthetic and real data.
