An algorithm for extracting skeletons of 3D scanned human body models

With the development of 3D scanning technique, skeleton extraction from scanned human body model is the most active research areas in virtual human modeling. Most of current methods have low calculation efficiency and an inaccurate computational result. Furthermore, most of them require manual intervention. To solve these problems, an efficient and accurate algorithm is presented for automatic skeleton extraction from scanned human body. Firstly, feature points of the model can be extracted automatically according to Morse function which is based on geodesic distance of human body model. Secondly, Morse function isolines can be calculated by defining a new Morse function on the scanned human body shape as geodesic distance from points to a source point, and skeleton can be extracted according to Morse function isolines of the model. The experiment results demonstrate that our approach is robust, efficient and automatic, and is more accurate than previous methods.