Character Reconstruction and Animation from Monocular Sequence of Images

In this paper we present different methods for the calibration and orientation of monocular image sequences and the 3D reconstruction of human characters. Three different situations are considered: a static character imaged with a moving camera, a moving character imaged with a fix camera and a moving character imaged with a moving camera. A self-acquired sequence is used in the first case while in the other cases we used existing sequences available on the Internet or digitized from old videotapes. Most of the image-based techniques use probabilistic approaches to model a character from monocular sequences; on the other hand we use a determinist approach, recovering character’s model and movement through a camera model. The recovered human models can be used for visualization purposes, to generate new virtual scenes of the analyzed sequence or for gait analysis.