"Multi-textured 3D humanoid reconstruction through passive and active automatic techniques" 

Rafael Pagés

E.T.S. Ing. Telecomunicación, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Abril 2016, "Sobresaliente".

Ph.D. thesis Director: Francisco Morán Burgos.

The proliferation of video games and other applications of computer graphics in everyday life demands a much easier way to create animatable virtual human characters. Traditionally, this has been the job of highly skilled artists and animators that painstakingly model, rig and animate their avatars, and usually have to tune them for each application and transmission/rendering platform. The emergence of virtual/mixed reality environments also calls for practical and cost- effective ways to produce custom models of actual people. The purpose of the present dissertation is bringing 3D human scanning closer to the average user. For this, two different techniques are presented, one passive and one active.

The first one is a fully automatic system for generating statically multi-textured avatars of real people captured with several standard cameras. Our system uses a state-of-the-art shape from silhouette technique to retrieve the shape of subject. However, to deal with the lack of detail that is common in the facial region for these kind of techniques, which do not handle concavities correctly, our system proposes an approach to improve the quality of this region. This face enhancement technique uses a generic facial model which is transformed according to the specific facial features of the subject. Moreover, this system features a novel technique for generating view-independent texture atlases computed from the original images. This static multi-texturing system yields a seamless texture atlas calculated by combining the color informa- tion from several photos. We suppress the color seams due to image misalignments and irregular lighting conditions that multi-texturing approaches typically suffer from, while minimizing the blurring effect introduced by color blending techniques.

The second technique features a system to retrieve a fully animatable 3D model of a human using a commercial depth sensor. Differently to other approaches in the current state of the art, our system does not require the user to be completely still through the scanning process, and neither the depth sensor is moved around the subject to cover all its surface. Instead, the depth sensor remains static and the skeleton tracking information is used to compensate the user’s movements during the scanning stage. Download here

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