Survey of 3D Human Body Representations

Abstract

The problem of human body modeling was initially tackled to solve applications related to the film industry or computer games within the computer graphics (CG) community. Since then, several different tools were developed for editing and animating 3D digital body models. Although at the beginning most of those tools were devised within the computer graphics community, nowadays a lot of work proceeds from the computer vision (CV) community. In spite of this overlapped interest, there is a considerable difference between CG and CV human body model (HBM) applications. The first one pursues realistic models of both human body geometry and its associated motion. On the contrary, CV seeks more of an efficient than an accurate model for applications such as intelligent video surveillance, motion analysis, telepresence, 3D video sequence processing, and coding.