Human motion synthesis from 3D video

Multiple view 3D video reconstruction of actor performance captures a level-of-detail for body and clothing movement which is time-consuming to produce using existing animation tools. In this paper we present a framework for concatenative synthesis from multiple 3D video sequences according to user constraints on movement, position and timing. Multiple 3D video sequences of an actor performing different movements are automatically constructed into a surface motion graph which represents the possible transitions with similar shape and motion between sequences without unnatural movement artifacts. Shape similarity over an adaptive temporal window is used to identify transitions between 3D video sequences. Novel 3D video sequences are synthesized by finding the optimal path in the surface motion graph between user specified key-frames for control of movement, location and timing. The optimal path which satisfies the user constraints whilst minimizing the total transition cost between 3D video sequences is found using integer linear programming. Results demonstrate that this framework allows flexible production of novel 3D video sequences which preserve the detailed dynamics of the captured movement for an actress with loose clothing and long hair without visible artifacts.