Pose Correction by Space-Time Integration

Abstract

The deformation of a given model into different poses is an important problem in computer graphics and computer animation. In a typical workflow, a carefully designed reference surface is deformed into a couple of poses, which can then act as a basis for interpolating arbitrarily intermediate poses. To this end the input poses should be free of geometric artifacts like self-intersections, since these degeneracies will be reproduced or even amplified by the interpolation. Not only are the resulting artifacts visually disturbing, they typically cause severe numerical problems for further downstream applications. In this paper we present an automatic approach for removing these geometric artifacts from a given set of mesh poses, while maintaining the original mesh connectivity. The deformation from the rest pose to a target pose is faithfully reproduced by integration of a smooth space-time vector field, which by construction guarantees the absence of self-intersections in the repaired target pose. Our approach is computationally efficient, and its effectiveness is demonstrated on a range of typical animation examples.