Delaunay Triangles Model for Image-Based Motion Retargeting

We present an automatic system for retargeting a human body motion extracted from an image sequence into a new character in a still image. In contrast to analyzing the articulated motion of its skeleton in the previous vision-based human body tracking and posture recognition system, we use direct 2-D image warping based on a silhouette. At first, we represent the performer’s silhouette with the Delaunay Triangles Model (DTM) of which the boundary points are the critical points of the silhouette. We then use a set of affine transformations of Delaunay triangles for the human body motion, which is applied to a new character for the deformation of the subject’s DTM. The final animation of the subject is texture mapped using backward Radial Basis Functions (RBFs). Although our algorithm presented in this paper is not applicable to the human body with self-occluded motion, it allows believable photorealistic motion retargeting.