Estimating 3D Human Shapes from Measurements

Stefanie Wuhrer, Chang Shu

Published 2011-09-06, updated 2012-03-16Version 2

The recent advances in 3-D imaging technologies give rise to databases of human shapes, from which statistical shape models can be built. These statistical models represent prior knowledge of the human shape and enable us to solve shape reconstruction problems from partial information. Generating human shape from traditional anthropometric measurements is such a problem, since these 1-D measurements encode 3-D shape information. Combined with a statistical shape model, these easy-to-obtain measurements can be leveraged to create 3D human shapes. However, existing methods limit the creation of the shapes to the space spanned by the database and thus require a large amount of training data. In this paper, we introduce a technique that extrapolates the statistically inferred shape to fit the measurement data using nonlinear optimization. This method ensures that the generated shape is both human-like and satisfies the measurement conditions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method and compare it to existing approaches through extensive experiments, using both synthetic data and real human measurements.