Continuous capture of skin deformation

Abstract

We describe a method for the acquisition of deformable human geometry from silhouettes. Our technique uses a commercial tracking system to determine the motion of the skeleton, then estimates geometry for each bone using constraints provided by the silhouettes from one or more cameras. These silhouettes do not give a complete characterization of the geometry for a particular point in time, but when the subject moves, many observations of the same local geometries allow the construction of a complete model. Our reconstruction algorithm provides a simple mechanism for solving the problems of view aggregation, occlusion handling, hole filling, noise removal, and deformation modeling. The resulting model is parameterized to synthesize geometry for new poses of the skeleton. We demonstrate this capability by rendering the geometry for motion sequences that were not included in the original datasets.