Abstract
We show that by extending the Laplacian formalism, which was first introduced in the Graphics community to regularize 3D meshes, we can turn the monocular 3D shape reconstruction of a deformable surface given correspondences with a reference image into a well-posed problem. Furthermore, this does not require any training data and elim- inates the need to pre-align the reference shape with the one to be re- constructed, as was done in earlier methods.