Broad Area Colloquium For AI-Geometry-Graphics-Robotics-Vision
(CS 528)


The quest for controllable, high-fidelity models of human shape and motion

Zoran Popović, University of Washington
November 8, 2004, 4:15PM
TCSeq 200
http://graphics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/

Abstract

One of the key challenges in computer graphics is the development of methods that create high-fidelity realism of shape and motion for humans and other living creatures. Bottom-up approaches to this problem try to develop detailed models of dynamics and musculo-skeletal structure in order to synthesize realistic shape and movement. Unfortunately, the underlying complexities of the natural motion are too great and, to a large extent, still unknown. In computer graphics, machine learning approaches tend to capture detailed realistic nuances by using large data-sets. Unfortunately, they often use overly simplified models, thus providing little control to the synthesis process.

This talk will present an argument for combining real-world data with the sophisticated models of natural systems to produce a controllable high-fidelity shape and motion of humans from minimal input data.

Specifically, I will describe a template-based model for representation and exploration of the space of human shape, that can produce realistic human shapes that meet specific parameters such as height, weight, body fat, etc. Subsequently, I will describe the reduced representation of the space of natural human poses, that captures the style of an individual and can be subsequently used to solve a wide range of inverse kinematics problems. Finally, I will show how a momentum-based model of human movement can be used to parameterize the dynamics of human motion. I will demonstrate how this framework can be used for real-time synthesis of a wide range of movement from a single input motion capture sequence.

About the Speaker

Zoran Popović is an Associate Professor in computer science at University of Washington. He received a ScB with Honors from Brown University, and MS and PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He has held research positions at Sun Microsystems and Justsystem Research Center and University of California at Berkeley. Zoran's research interests lie in computer animation, primarily in physically based modeling, high-fidelity human modeling, and control of realistic natural motion. His contributions to the field of computer graphics have been recently recognized by a number of awards including the NSF CAREER Award, Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award.


Contact: bac-coordinators@cs.stanford.edu

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