3D-Reconstruction of the Common Murre

Abstract: Automatic 3D reconstruction of birds can aid researchers in studying their behavior. Recently there has been an attempt to reconstruct a variety of birds from single-view images. However, the common murre's appearance is different from the birds that have been studied. Moreover, recent studies have focused on side views. This thesis studies the 3D reconstruction of the common murre from single-view top-view images. A template mesh is first optimized to fit a 3D scan. Then the result is used to optimize a species-specific mean from side-view images annotated with keypoints and silhouettes. The resulting mean mesh is used to initialize the optimization for top-down images. Using a mask loss, a pose prior loss, and a bone length loss that uses a mean vector from the side-view images improves the 3D reconstruction as rated by humans. Furthermore, the intersection over union (IoU) and percentage of correct keypoint (PCK), although used by other authors, are insufficient in a single-view top-view setting.