Video-based animation of people

Capture and representation of a persons appearance during movement in a form that can be manipulated for highly realistic computer animation in games and film is an open research problem. This talk will present a number of approaches that have been introduced to capture people from multiple view video using both model-based and model-free computer vision methodologies. Surface Motion Capture (SurfCap) will be introduced which allows representation and animation control of people with the captured dynamics of clothing during movement. SurfCap will be presented as an analogous technology to skeletal human motion capture using markers (MoCap) which has become a standard production tool. Surface motion graphs are used to animate people from multiple captured surface sequences allowing control of movement and action. Surface matching methods based on geometry image sequences using spherical parameterisation are used to transition between captured motion sequences and reconstruct skeletal movement. SurfCap's potential as a future technology for production in games and film will be discussed.