Character Reconstruction and Animation from Uncalibrated Video

We present a novel method to reconstruct 3D character models from video. The main conceptual contribution is that the reconstruction can be performed from a single uncalibrated video sequence which shows the character in articulated motion. We reduce this generalized problem setting to the easier case of multi-view reconstruction of a rigid scene by applying pose synchronization of the character between frames. This is enabled by two central technical contributions. First, based on a generic character shape template, a new mesh-based technique for accurate shape tracking is proposed. This method successfully handles the complex occlusions issues, which occur when tracking the motion of an articulated character. Secondly, we show that image-based 3D reconstruction becomes possible by deforming the tracked character shapes as-rigid-as-possible into a common pose using motion capture data. After pose synchronization, several partial reconstructions can be merged in order to create a single, consistent 3D character model. We integrated these components into a simple interactive framework, which allows for straightforward generation and animation of 3D models for a variety of character shapes from uncalibrated monocular video.