Analysis and classification of three-dimensional trunk shape of women by using the human body shape model

In this paper, we propose a method of statistically analyzing overall shape of the trunk and classifying those of Japanese women into smaller number of classes. The main problem in this research is that the number of the coordinates of the control points in the shape data is more than 1,000 so that the principal component analysis or other many statistically analyzing methods are inapplicable to them. To address this problem, we use correlation coefficients between coordinates of each pair of the control points to reduce the number of the data without loss of overall information on trunk shape and then apply the principal component analysis to the reduced shape data. In this paper we apply the proposed method to 560 Japanese women and classify their trunk shapes into five classes. Abstract--This paper proposes a new method for extracting shape components of the trunk of woman from three-dimensional measurements and tries a classification of the trunk shapes. Subjects in this study are 560 Japanese women, ranging in age from 19 to 63 years. First we describe three-dimensional (3D) trunk shape using the control points given by fitting the human body shape model to 3D measurements of the subjects, and reduce the number of the control points to be suited for statistical analysis based on correlation strength. The Principal component analysis is applied to the shape data, or the reduced set of the control points. Then we try to interpret the trunk shape components by combining factor loading map and averaged shape models. Finally we try to classify the trunk shape of Japanese women by means of the cluster analysis of component scores of the above results. We can expect that the method will be applied to various sorts of customer groups and the results will be reflected in clothe design instead of seat-of-the-pants approach of designers. As a result it will be helpful in producing not only size and shape fitting clothes but also functional clothes in shape adjustment, posture adjustment, wear-comfort.