  Conventional structure-from-motion (SFM) research is primarily concerned with
the 3D reconstruction of a single, rigidly moving object seen by a static
camera, or a static and rigid scene observed by a moving camera --in both cases
there are only one relative rigid motion involved. Recent progress have
extended SFM to the areas of {multi-body SFM} (where there are {multiple rigid}
relative motions in the scene), as well as {non-rigid SFM} (where there is a
single non-rigid, deformable object or scene). Along this line of thinking,
there is apparently a missing gap of "multi-body non-rigid SFM", in which the
task would be to jointly reconstruct and segment multiple 3D structures of the
multiple, non-rigid objects or deformable scenes from images. Such a multi-body
non-rigid scenario is common in reality (e.g. two persons shaking hands,
multi-person social event), and how to solve it represents a natural
{next-step} in SFM research. By leveraging recent results of subspace
clustering, this paper proposes, for the first time, an effective framework for
multi-body NRSFM, which simultaneously reconstructs and segments each 3D
trajectory into their respective low-dimensional subspace. Under our
formulation, 3D trajectories for each non-rigid structure can be well
approximated with a sparse affine combination of other 3D trajectories from the
same structure (self-expressiveness). We solve the resultant optimization with
the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). We demonstrate the
efficacy of the proposed framework through extensive experiments on both
synthetic and real data sequences. Our method clearly outperforms other
alternative methods, such as first clustering the 2D feature tracks to groups
and then doing non-rigid reconstruction in each group or first conducting 3D
reconstruction by using single subspace assumption and then clustering the 3D
trajectories into groups.
