Human Shape and Motion Recovery Using Animation Models

Deriving human body shape and motion from optical or magnetic motion-capture data is an inherently difficult task. The body is very complex and the data is rarely error-free and often incomplete. The task becomes even more difficult if one attempts to use video-data instead, because it is much noisier. In the last few years, we have developed techniques that use sophisticated human animation models to fit such noisy and incomplete data. It is acquired using a variety of devices, ranging from sophisticated optical motion-capture systems to ordinary video-cameras. We use facial and body animation models, not only to represent the data, but also to guide the fitting process, thereby substantially improving performance.