Generation of Human Body Models

The goal of the research presented in this thesis is to design an integrated system for the automatic acquisition of a human body model, using input images from mutually orthogonal views. The model consists of two sets of free-form surface patches: the torso and its arms. We determine a neck joint on the torso and six joint positions on the arms (i.e., one location for each shoulder, elbow and wrist). A conventional three-dimensional reconstruction technique called “shape from silhouettes” is applied in the project. However, one of the challenges of the project is to automatically separate the body segments during the reconstruction of the model from occluded silhouettes. The system suggests a body part localization procedure to determine the joint positions through the analysis of a feature view of body poses. Furthermore, this virtual human model is capable of simulating the motion of a real person using a-priori knowledge of the body. The human model will be specified using Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) and visualized and rendered in a scene graph system, OpenSG.