Video based human animation technique

Abstract

Human animation is a challenging domain in computer animation. To aim at many shortcomings in conventional techniques, this paper proposes a new video based human animation technique. Given a clip of video, firstly human joints are tracked with the support of Kalman filter and morph-block based match in the image sequence. Then corresponding sequence of three-dimension (3D) human motion skeleton is constructed under the perspective projection using camera calibration and human anatomy knowledge. Finally a motion library is established automatically by annotating multiform motion attributes, which can be browsed and queried by the animator. This approach has the characteristic of rich source material, low computing cost, efficient production, and realistic animation result. We demonstrate it on several video clips of people doing full body movements, and visualize the results by re-animating a 3D human skeleton model.