One interesting tidbit making the rounds over the weekend is a technical paper to appear at SIGGRAPH Asia on dynamic reshaping of human anatomy in video to change their physical attributes. I seem to recall seeing this at SIGGRAPH previously, and the results are impressive.
We present a system for quick and easy manipulation of the body shape and proportions of a human actor in arbitrary video footage. The approach is based on a morphable model of 3D human shape and pose that was learned from laser scans of real people. The algorithm commences by spatio-temporally fitting the pose and shape of this model to the actor in either single-view or multi-view video footage. Once the model has been fitted, semantically meaningful attributes of body shape, such as height, weight or waist girth, can be interactively modified by the user. The changed proportions of the virtual human model are then applied to the actor in all video frames by performing an image-based warping. By this means, we can now conveniently perform spatio-temporal reshaping of human actors in video footage which we show on a variety of video sequences.
They’ve already posted the paper (download, view online) and a demonstration video (below). If you look closely you can see some deformation of the environment when doing some rather extreme deformations, but for the occasional pound or muscle tone, it could be useful. Although it does bring the old “Dove Evolution” video to mind.
via MovieReshape: Tracking and Reshaping of Humans in Videos.
