Generating animatable 3D virtual humans from photographs

We present an easy, practical and efficient full body cloning methodology. This system utilizes photos taken from the front, side and back of a person in any given imaging environment without requiring a special background or a controlled illuminating condition. A seamless generic body specified in the VRML H-Anim 1.1 format is used to generate an individualized virtual hu man. The system is composed of two major components: face-cloning and body- cloning. The face-cloning component uses feature points on front and side i mages and then applies DFFD for shape modification. Next a fully automatic seamless texture mapping is generated for 360 degrees coloring on a 3D poly gonal model. The body-cloning component has two steps: (i) feature points s pecification, which enables automatic silhouette detection in an arbitrary background (ii) two-stage body modification by using feature points and bod y silhouette respectively. The final integrated human model has photo-reali stic animatable face, hands, feet and body. The result can be visualized in any VRML compliant browser.