Real-Time Capture, Reconstruction and Insertion into Virtual World of Human Actors

Abstract

In this paper, we show how to capture an actor with no intrusive trackers and without any special environment like blue set, how to estimate its 3D-geometry and how to insert this geometry into a virtual world in real-time. We use several cameras in conjunction with background subtraction to produce silhouettes of the actor as observed from the different camera viewpoints. These silhouettes allow the 3D-geometry of the actor to be estimated by a voxel based method. This geometry is rendered with a marching cube algorithm and inserted into a virtual world. Shadows of the actor corresponding to virtual lights are then added and interactions with objects of the virtual world are proposed. The main originality of this paper is to propose a complete pipeline that can computes up to 30 frames per second. Since the rapidity of the process depends mainly on its slowest step, we present here all these steps. For each of them, we present and discuss the solution that is used. Some of them are new solutions, as the 3D shape estimation which is achieved using graphics hardware. Results are presented and discussed.