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Updated: Jul 15, 2026
11:57
Measuring Spatially- and Directionally-varying Light Scattering from Biological Material
Published on: May 20, 2013
Seeing people in different light--joint shape, motion, and reflectance capture
Christian Theobalt1, Naveed Ahmed, Hendrik Lensch
1MPI Informatic, Saarbuecken, Germany. theobalt@mpi-inf.mpg.de
Summary
This study introduces a video-based method to capture human shape, motion, and surface reflectance from synchronized videos. This enables realistic 3D character rendering and virtual dressing applications.
Area of Science:
- Computer Vision
- Computer Graphics
- 3D Reconstruction
Background:
- Passive optical motion capture allows authentic animation and photo-realistic texturing of real people.
- Importing real-world characters into virtual environments requires knowledge of their surface reflectance properties.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop a video-based modeling approach for capturing human shape, motion, and reflectance characteristics.
- To enable realistic reproduction of animated virtual actors under novel lighting conditions.
Main Methods:
- Utilizes synchronized video recordings from multiple viewpoints.
- Employs a video-based modeling approach to recover spatially varying surface reflectance properties of clothing.
- Captures human shape and motion alongside reflectance characteristics.
Main Results:
- Successfully recovers spatially varying surface reflectance properties of clothes from multiview video.
- Enables realistic appearance reproduction of animated virtual actors under different lighting.
- Facilitates interchange of surface attributes for applications like virtual dressing.
Conclusions:
- The developed method creates 3D renditions of real-world people with accurate appearance under arbitrary lighting.
- This approach is suitable for creating realistic virtual characters on standard graphics hardware.
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