These techniques have been applied in medical gait analysis, inserting synthetic characters into live action sequences, tracking people in a lobby environment, and surveillance.
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Description:
The representation and display of realistic facial animation is being
researched in order to support video teleconferencing applications in which
limited bandwidth prevents the transmission of live video.
Image processing techniques (at Texas Instruments) are used to
identify the positions of key feature points of the face.
These are transmitted to a remote site and a synthetic
face is reconstructed using local computational resources in real-time.
Our task is to determine how to best display the face in terms of both
speed and realism.
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Student: Meg Geroch
Support: None
Work performed at: ACCAD
Status: Ongoing
Student: Matt Lewis
Support: None
Work performed at: ACCAD
Status: Initiated Summer, 1997
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Student: Lawson Wade
Support: None
Work performed at: ACCAD
Status: Ongoing
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Description:
Research into a more anatomically based representatio of the human figure
is being conducted in conjunction with ACCAD.
Human anatomy is used to model the skeleton and its associated articulations
in greater detail than ever before.
Anatomically based muscles are incorporated into the model based on their
importance in producing realistic form.
These are used to define an implicit function and B-spline control points
are found at an isosurface.
A B-spline surface can then be fitted to the form implied by the skeleton and
musculature.
Student: Ferdi Scheepers
Work performed at: ACCAD
Status: Ph.D. in '96
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Description:
Low level techniques have been investigated to speed up the display of
distance-based primitives used to generate implicit surfaces.
In previous work, the ray tracing of cone-spheres, spherically-capped
cylinders, and rounded polygons was sped up by incorporating the same type
of coherence considerations used by Blinn in his '82 TOG article, often
credited for introducing 'metaballs' to the graphics community.
Student: Karanasher Singh
Papers:
Status: Ph.D. Dissertation completed December, 1995
In more recent work, an adaptive octree polygonalizer has been developed
which takes advantage of the primitives used to generate the implicit
surface in controlling the amount of subdivision. This is combined
with more complex intra-cell surface elements.
Recent work performed at: AutoDesSys, Inc.
Status: ongoing
Implicit surface definitions are also used to form the fillet between two independently digitized parts of the human figure, such as the upper and lower arm. Polygonal sections outside the area of overlap are retained in their original definition while implicit surfaces are computed in the area of overlap.
Student: Karan Singh
Work performed at: ATR Labs, Japan
Status: Ph.D. Dissertation completed December, 1995
Papers:
Description:
3D morphing is a difficult problem.
One general approach to the problem is to preprocess the origianl
object defintions so that their edge-vertex topologoy match.
The objects can then be blended on a vertex-by-vertex basis.
One approach used here employs a recursive division of the surfaces,
adding vertices and splitting faces as it progresses to maintain
similar topologies.
Another approach used was to map each object onto the surface of a sphere
and then intersect edges.
The resulting new vertices and edge segments were then added to the original
object definitions to produce objects with matching topologies.
Papers:
Description:
A genetic algorithm was used to search an obstacle-filled environment
for possible paths to one
or more goals (e.g. tip of end effector at a certain location and wrist
at a certain location). Several optimization functions were tested as
possible ones to use to produce the most human-like motion: shortest
end-effector path, smallest maximum torque, etc.
The animation shown here demonstrates the path found in order to satisfy positional goals (represented by spheres) for the tip of the limb and for the last joint of the limb.
Student: Dave Miller
Status: Dissertation completed 1994
Paper: Dave Miller and Richard Parent, ``An Articulated Limb Motion Planner for Optimized Movement,'' The Journal of Visualization and Animation, John Wiley & Sons, New York, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 89-123, April-June 1994. (also OSU CIS Technical Report, OSU-CISRC-2/93-TR8, February 1993.)
