3D body scanning with hairstyle using one time-of-flight camera

Capturing realistic 3D shapes of human bodies is very useful for many computer graphics applications. However, for existing 3D shape capturing devices, such as structured light, laser scanner or multi-view methods, problems arise when dealing with 3D hairstyle scanning and body deformation. To solve these problems, a novel approach is proposed to scan 3D body with hairstyle using only one time-of-flight (TOF) camera. By capturing depth data at video rate, temporal average meshes can be obtained from different views. After some analysis, we found that the local geometric details of real surfaces, after the hair scanning process and low-frequency body deformation, are still preserved in the average meshes. Utilising the restriction that the corresponding surfaces in different views should overlap, a global optimisation process is proposed to iteratively improve the average meshes, while still preserving the geometric details. The proposed system is compact, and can scan 3D human body easily. Copyright # 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.