Modeling of female human body shapes for apparel design based on cross mean sets

This paper is concerned with a method to build prototypes of human bodies that can be used for apparel design. One of the most important issues in the apparel development process is to define a sizing system to provide a good fitting for the majority of the population. Since anthropometric measures do not present the same linear growth with size in each dimension, it is very important to find a prototype that represents as accurately as possible each class in the sizing system. In this paper we propose a method based on the concept of random compact mean set to define prototypes in apparel design. From a cloud of 3D points obtained with a 3D scanner a solid that represents the human body is obtained. 2D cross sections of this solid are extracted at certain heights corresponding to key points of the body. These different cross-sections can be seen as a realization of a random compact set in the plane. A very popular definition on mean set is applied to each sample of 2D cross sections, and finally the prototype is obtained as the 3D reconstruction of these 2D mean sections. As a real example, the proposed methodology is applied to the 3D database obtained from a anthropometric survey of the Spanish female population conducted in this country in 2006.