3D Semantic Parameterization for Human Shape Modeling: Application to 3D Animation

Statistical human body models, like SCAPE, capture static 3D human body shapes and poses and are applied to many Computer Vision problems. Defined in a statistical context, their parameters do not explicitly capture semantics of the human body shapes such as height, weight, limb length, etc. Having a set of semantic parameters would allow users and automated algorithms to sample the space of possible body shape variations in a more intuitive way. Therefore, in this paper we propose a method for re-parameterization of statistical human body models such that shapes are controlled by a small set of intuitive semantic parameters. These parameters are learned directly from the available statistical human body model. In order to apply any arbitrary animation to our human body shape model we perform retargeting. From any set of 3D scans, a semantic parametrized model can be generated and animated with the presented methods using any animation data. We quantitatively show that our semantic parameterization is more reliable than standard semantic parameterizations, and show a number of animations retargeted to our semantic body shape model.