Realistic Human Body Modeling

Synthetic modeling of human bodies and the si-mulation of motion is a longstanding problem in animation and much work is involved before a near-realistic performance can be achieved. At present, it takes an experienced designer a very long time to build a complete and realistic model that closely resembles a speci c person. Our ul-timate goal is to automate the process: Eventu-ally the whole task should be performed quickly by an operator who is not necessarily an expe-rienced graphics designer. We should be able to invite a visitor to our laboratory, make him walk in front of a set of cameras, and quickly produce a realistic animation of himself. We rst present the models we use for body modeling. Our layered representation of the hu-man body is very e ective for animation purpo-ses: Once the layered character is constructed, only the underlying skeleton need be scripted for animation. We then show that the motion of this skeleton can be recovered from video sequences. We con-centrate on a video-based approach because of its comparatively lower cost and better control of the dynamic nature of the process.