Scanning 3D Full Human Bodies Using Kinects

—Depth camera such as Microsoft Kinect, is much cheaper than conventional 3D scanning devices, and thus it can be acquired for everyday users easily. However, the depth data captured by Kinect over a certain distance is of extreme low quality. In this paper, we present a novel scanning system for capturing 3D full human body models by using multiple Kinects. To avoid the interference phenomena, we use two Kinects to capture the upper part and lower part of a human body respectively without overlapping region. A third Kinect is used to capture the middle part of the human body from the opposite direction. We propose a practical approach for registering the various body parts of different views under non-rigid deformation. First, a rough mesh template is constructed and used to deform successive frames pairwisely. Second, global alignment is performed to distribute errors in the deformation space, which can solve the loop closure problem efficiently. Misalignment caused by complex occ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: TVCG
• Authors: Jing Tong, Jin Zhou, Ligang Liu, Zhigeng Pan, Hao Yan
• Keywords: Alignment Algorithm, Hardware, Human Body Models, Interference Phenomena, TVCG 2012