Smoothed surface transitions for human motion synthesis

Multiview techniques to reconstruct an animation from 3D video have advanced in leaps and bounds in recent years. It is now possible to synthesise a 3D animation by fusing motions between different sequences. Prior work in this area has established methods to successfully identify inter-sequence transitions of different or similar actions. In some instances however, the transitions at these nodes in the motion path would cause an abrupt change between the motion sequences. Hence, this paper proposes a framework that allows for smoothing of these inter-sequence transitions, while preserving the detailed dynamics of the captured movement. Laplacian based mesh deformation, in addition to shape and appearance based feature methods, including SIFT and MeshHOG features, are used to obtain temporally consistent meshes. These meshes are then interpolated within a temporal window and concatenated to reproduce a seamless transition between the motion sequences. A quantitative analysis of the inter-sequence transitions, evaluated using three dimensional shape based Hausdorff distance is presented for synthesised 3D animations.