Vis Comput DOI 10.1007/s00371-014-1043-1 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Example-guided anthropometric human body modeling Yuzhe Zhang · Jianmin Zheng · Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014 Abstract This paper presents an example-guided, anthro- pometry-based modeling method for creating 3D human body models from users’ input of partial anthropometric mea- surements with a given example dataset. Rather than directly forming a mapping between the partial measurements and the body model, we first estimate a set of chosen 30 measure- ments from the input based on the example-oriented measure- ment analysis. We then create an initial 3D model using the example-oriented radial basis function model that maps the set of 30 measurements to the body shape space and is estab- lished based on the given examples. We finally refine the 3D model by constrained optimization to create the target body model. Our method has several advantages: (1) the created model is guaranteed to match the input measurements and reflects the shape characteristics of examples; (2) the input requirement is modest, which makes it useful in practice; and (3) the information of both the measurements and examples is fully utilized. We demonstrate the effectiveness, accuracy, flexibility and extensibility of the method by various exper- imental evaluations and a Kinect-based body customization application. Keywords Human body modeling · Anthropometry · Examples · Correlation analysis · RBF interpolation · Constrained optimization Y. Zhang · J. Zheng (B ) School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798, Singapore e-mail: asjmzheng@ntu.edu.sg Y. Zhang e-mail: YZHANG3@e.ntu.edu.sg N. Magnenat-Thalmann Institute of Media Innovation, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798, Singapore e-mail: NADIATHALMANN@ntu.edu.sg 1 Introduction Human body modeling is a well-studied problem in com- puter graphics and animation. It has applications in many fields such as virtual reality, computer games and human- centered industry design [18]. While a large variety of human body modeling techniques have been available, it is still non- trivial to quickly and easily generate quality body models with simple specifications and without complicated setup or processing of acquisition. This paper considers the problem of efficiently creating a 3D body model from a few anthropometric measurement inputs (for example, stature and shoulder length), given a set of human body examples, such that the created body model satisfies the specified measurements and also reflects the characteristics of the body space specified by the example models. The problem is motivated by the following observa- tions or considerations. First, anthropometry is the science of body measurement that analyzes the human physical variations. It plays an important role in industry design where statistical data about the distribution of body dimensions in the population are used to optimize products. Some anthropometric measure- ments have very intuitive geometric meanings. Hence it is tempting and useful to model and customize human body based on anthropometric measurements, especially to pop- ulate virtual humans. In fact, anthropometry-based methods have been developed in computer graphics [10, 12]. Second, there exist many anthropometric measurements. It is inconvenient for users to provide all those measurements in practice. Hence papers [23] and [3] proposed to use 8 and 14 measurements, respectively. Different from these works, we relax the restriction on the measurements and allow users to enter different numbers and types of measurements. This provides great flexibility in human body modeling and makes 123