Video-based Capturing and Rendering of People

The interesting combination of Chapters in this book gives a nice overview of the importance of the analysis of human motion in three different scientific disciplines, computer vision, biomechanics, and computer graphics. In the computer vision field the main goal has been to develop robust and efficient techniques for capturing and measuring human motion. Researchers from biomechanics, on the other hand, try to capitalize on such measurement methods to analyze the characteristics of human motion. In contrast, the focus of computer graphics research has been to realistically animate and render moving humans. In this Chapter, we will outline that a joint solution to the acquisition, the reconstruction, and the rendering problem paves the trail for video-based capturing and rendering of people. We present a model-based system to create realistic 3D videos of human actors that puts this idea into practice. Our method enables us to capture human actors with multiple video cameras and to render their performances in real-time from arbitrary novel viewpoints and under arbitrary novel lighting conditions.