Automatic Conversion of Human Mesh into Skeleton Animation by Using Kinect Motion

Abstract

Skeleton-base-animation methods have been commonly used in the character animations. The process of making skeleton for character animation is a long-winded task requiring manual tweaking. This paper presents a novel method to create an automatic animated skeleton from 3D human geometric model through mesh contraction. An automatically generated skeleton is animated by using Kinect captured human motion. The method first, extract a 1D curve-skeleton from the mesh through mesh contraction with constraints. Secondly, the hierarchical joint-based skeleton (armature) has been generated, using the extracted 1D curve-skeleton of the input mesh automatically. Third, the real-time human motion is captured by using the Kinect device. The Kinect captured motion also converts into a standard skeleton motion BVH (Biovision hierarchical) format. Finally, the Kinect motion is retargeted to animate the resulting skeleton of the mesh through joint mapping. The main objective of the proposed approach is to minimize labor-intensive process of skeleton adjustment for character animation. The results of a mesh generated skeleton and plausible skeleton animation to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed work. The mesh generated skeleton and Kinect motion skeleton both can be directly useful for mesh skinning, mesh rigging, and motion retargeting to create satisfactory character animation. Studio and Blender. These packages require manual tweaking of the skeleton, such as bones and vertex weighting of character, manual creation of a skeleton hierarchy for getting desired animation effects. In present animation systems, object representation and its skeleton are disjointed, which often create problems in animation of the objects. The character animation based on skeleton still require experienced work and laborious process. To address these problems, a new framework has been proposed to generate an automatic animated skeleton from 3D human geometric mesh model. In this study, first extract a curve-skeleton from a polygon mesh by using mesh Laplican contractions. The extracted curve-skeleton is converted into a joint-based-skeleton automatically.This method is to make a skeleton, which has an accurate joint position, follow typology of the human skeleton. The flow of method divided into four phases. In first phase, mesh contraction has been applied to contract the given mesh model. The mesh contraction process preserves the original topology and connectivity of the mesh model. The mesh contraction process based on Laplacian smoothing with constraints. Contract the mesh iteratively until to obtain a 1D shape of that model. The 1D curve-skeleton is derived from the contracted mesh through edge contraction operation. The methods of Au et al. (4) used as starting point of the contracting mesh model. Second phase, present an automatic conversion of the refined curve-skeleton into a joint-based skeleton. Because the suitable extracted curve-skeleton should leave enough information for the overall structure, while maintaining a certain level of details for the model. The extracted