Realistic and real-time reproduction of human body movements for virtual space teleconferencing

This paper describes realistic, real-time 3-D reproduction of human body movements based on detection data from a small number of sensors attached to a participant for virtual space teleconferencing. A 3-D human model is created by a skeletal link model. WFM (Wire Frame Model), body segments for FFD (Free Form Deformations), and IFP (Implicit Function Primitives) for body parts. In this model WFM provides fast rendering ability and FFD and IFP give natural deformation representation. A reconstruction algorithm that can deal with human movements in teleconference situations is proposed; sensed data are used to reconstruct whole body movements by utilizing motion constraints. Experiments, in which four magnetic sensors for detecting the six pose parameters are attached to the upper half of a human body, show the effectiveness of the proposed 3-D human model and reconstruction method, in which human movements are reproduced at a speed of 8 frames/sec.