3D reconstruction of static human body with a digital camera

Nowadays the interest in 3D reconstruction and modeling of real humans is one of the most challenging problems and a topic of great interest. The human models are used for movies, video games or ergonomics applications and they are usually created with scanner devices. In this paper a new method to reconstruct the shape of a static human is presented. Our approach is based on photogrammetric techniques and uses a sequence of images acquired around a standing person with a digital still video camera or with a camcorder. First the images are calibrated and orientated using a bundle adjustment and automatically recover the required tie points and initial approximations of the unknowns. After the establishment of a stable adjusted image block, an image matching process is performed between consecutive triplets of images. Finally the 3D coordinates of the matched points are computed with a mean accuracy of ca 2mm by forward ray intersection using the restored camera parameters. The obtained point cloud can then be triangulated to generate a surface model of the body or a virtual human model can be fitted to the recovered 3D data. Results of the 3D human point cloud with pixel color information are presented.