Automatic modeling of virtual humans and body clothing

Highly realistic virtual human models are rapidly becoming commonplace in computer graphics. These models, often represented by complex shape and requiring labor-intensive process, challenge the problem of automatic modeling. The problem and solutions to automatic modeling of animatable virtual humans are studied. Methods for capturing the shape of real people, parameterization techniques for modeling static shape (the variety of human body shapes) and dynamic shape (how the body shape changes as it moves) of virtual humans are classified, summarized and compared. Finally, methods for clothed virtual humans are reviewe

Modeling 3D animals from a side-view sketch

Shape Modeling International 2014International audienceUsing 2D contour sketches as input is an attractive solution for easing the creation of 3D models. This paper tackles the problem of creating 3D models of animals from a single, side-view sketch. We use the a priori assumptions of smoothness and structural symmetry of the animal about the sagittal plane to inform the 3D reconstruction. Our contributions include methods for identifying and inferring the contours of shape parts from the input sketch, a method for identifying the hierarchy of these structural parts including the detection of approximate symmetric pairs, and a hierarchical algorithm for positioning and blending these parts into a consistent 3D implicit-surface-based model. We validate this pipeline by showing that a number of plausible animal shapes can be automatically constructed from a single sketch

Near-infrared spectra of Galactic stellar clusters detected on Spitzer/GLIMPSE images

We present near-infrared spectroscopic observations of massive stars in three stellar clusters located in the direction of the inner Galaxy. One of them, the Quartet, is a new discovery while the other two were previously reported as candidate clusters identified on mid-infrared Spitzer images (GLIMPSE20 and GLIMPSE13). Using medium-resolution (R=900-1320) H and K spectroscopy, we firmly establish the nature of the brightest stars in these clusters, yielding new identifications of an early WC and two Ofpe/WN9 stars in the Quartet and an early WC star in GLIMPSE20. We combine this information with the available photometric measurements from 2MASS, to estimate cluster masses, ages, and distances. The presence of several massive stars places the Quartet and GLIMPSE20 among the small sample of known Galactic stellar clusters with masses of a few 10^3 Msun, and ages from 3 to 8 Myr. We estimate a distance of about 3.5 kpc for Glimpse 20, and 6.0 kpc for Quartet. The large number of giant stars identified in GLIMPSE13 indicates that it is another massive (~ 6500 Msun) cluster, but older, with an age between 30 and 100 Myr, at a distance of about 3 kpc.Comment: aastex macro, 21 pages, 15 figures. ApJ, accepte

The future of biotic indices in the ecogenomic era: Integrating (e)DNA metabarcoding in biological assessment of aquatic ecosystems

The bioassessment of aquatic ecosystems is currently based on various biotic indices that use the occurrence and/or abundance of selected taxonomic groups to define ecological status. These conventional indices have some limitations, often related to difficulties in morphological identification of bioindicator taxa. Recent development of DNA barcoding and metabarcoding could potentially alleviate some of these limitations, by using DNA sequences instead of morphology to identify organisms and to characterize a given ecosystem. In this paper, we review the structure of conventional biotic indices, and we present the results of pilot metabarcoding studies using environmental DNA to infer biotic indices. We discuss the main advantages and pitfalls of metabarcoding approaches to assess parameters such as richness, abundance, taxonomic composition and species ecological values, to be used for calculation of biotic indices. We present some future developments to fully exploit the potential of metabarcoding data and improve the accuracy and precision of their analysis. We also propose some recommendations for the future integration of DNA metabarcoding to routine biomonitoring programs.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Sketch-Based Interaction Free-Form Sketching of Self- Occluding

other or self-occlude, their drawings typically consist of a set of contours that might partially overlap or self-overlap. The authors ’ method infers the hidden parts of contours and creates a smooth 3D shape matching those contours by solving a set of optimization problems. 1 Drawing of a torus knot. Sketching interfaces to 3D object modeling facilitate 3D object reconstruction from a 2D drawing provided by a designer. Igarashi presented the Teddy silhouette-based sketching system, which has a simple, intuitive interface. 1 Followup research has mainly focused on the representation issue for the resulting 3D objects, as given in recent work: variational implicit surfaces2 and other forms of implicit surfaces. 3 In this article, we address a different issue, the extension of the modeling domain. In par-ticular, we consider the modeling of self-occluding objects (or multiple objects possibly occluding each other), as Figure 1 shows. The creation of such objects with an existing tool such as Teddy 1 is rather awkward: the 2D closed curves would result in their corresponding 3D pieces that should be combined by detecting the hidden portions. We propose an integrated approach to this problem. Our approach first extracts the 2D skeleton on the sketching plane, given a set of contours self-intersecting or intersecting each other. Then, we derive the 3D skeleton from its 2D counterpart. Finally, we construct the 3D objects(s). Our main contribution is the second step, which derives the 3D skeleton by computing the depth at each (self-)intersecting point on the 2D skeleton, while guaranteeing the intersection-free condition and C1-continuity at the corresponding points in the 3D space. We formulate th

Reconstruction of helices from their orthogonal projection

International audienceWe describe a method for modeling helices from planar curves. Given a polygonal curve in the ( x , y ) plane, the method computes a helix such that its orthogonal projection onto the ( x , y ) plane fits the polygonal curve. The helix curve is first sampled and the transformation matrix that best aligns points of the sampled helix to those of the polygonal curve is calculated. This transformation matrix is then used to estimate the parameters of the helix whose projection fits the polygonal curve

Texture Mapping of Images with Arbitrary Contours

Decaling is an intuitive paradigm for texture mapping in an analogy of attaching stickers on an object in the real world. This paradigm enables an artist to put decals directly on a 3D model after interactive manipulations such as modifying their positions, scales and orientations. In this paper, we present a novel method for multipleconstrained decaling. Given a region inside a texture together with a set of feature points in the region and a 3D model, our problem is to map the texture region onto the surface of the model in an intuitive manner, while satisfying the constrained imposed by a user-specified correspondence between a set of feature points in the region and the surface. We propose a solution for this problem. Our approach iteratively determines a portion of the mesh representing the surface while accordingly refining its parameterization, guided by the feature point correspondence

RGB-D IBR: Rendering Indoor Scenes Using Sparse RGB-D Images with Local Alignments

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