Finding corresponding points during nonrigid motion is a difficult but important problem. If the correspondence between all the points innonrigid motion can be determined, the complete information about the motion can be found. That requires the application of a specific constraint (similar to nonrigidity constraints utilized by rigid motion analysis algorithms). However, nonrigid motion has extremely varying nature (consider articulated motion V.5. motion of fluids). Hence, it is very unlikely that we can find a single nonrigidity assumption which can be utilized by all applications. Therefore, the idea is to utilize possible a priori knowledge to limit possible nonrigid behaviors. This a priori knowledge may be general or specific, local or global.In this paper, we consider the problem of tracking elastic objects with known material properties. That corresponds to utilization of specific a priori knowledge in nonrigid motion analysis. We propose the utilization of nonlinear finite element methods(FEM) for point correspondence recovery. We deal with range data, i.e. assume that surface points before and after motion are available from the sensing system. Nonlinear FEM not only allows for modeling of nonlinear material properties but also for large deformation between consecutive time frames (which are main limitations of widely utilized linear FEM). We propose a new algorithm for the point correspondence recovery in nonrigid motion using assumptions of known material properties and single (but not known) force applied to the object. Simulations and experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm. 0-8194-1280-5/931$6.0O Downloaded From: http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/ on 06/23/2016 Terms of Use: http://spiedigitallibrary.org/ss/TermsOfUse.aspx