Articulated Billboards for Video-based Rendering

We present a novel representation and rendering method for free-viewpoint video of human characters based on multiple input video streams. The basic idea is to approximate the articulated 3D shape of the human body using a subdivision into textured billboards along the skeleton structure. Billboards are clustered to fans such that each skeleton bone contains one billboard per source camera. We call this representation articulated billboards. In the paper we describe a semi-automatic, data-driven algorithm to construct and render this representation, which robustly handles even challenging acquisition scenarios characterized by sparse camera positioning, inaccurate camera calibration, low video resolution, or occlusions in the scene. First, for each input view, a 2D pose estimation based on image silhouettes, motion capture data, and temporal video coherence is used to create a segmentation mask for each body part. Then, from the 2D poses and the segmentation, the actual articulated bi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: Eurographics
• Authors: Marcel Germann, Alexander Hornung, Richard Keiser, Remo Ziegler, Stephan Würmlin, Markus Gross
• Keywords: Articulated Billboards, Billboard, Computer Graphics, EUROGRAPHICS 2010, Representation Articulated Billboards