High Quality Semi-Automatic Production of Animations Using Commodity RGB-D Sensors

Supervisor: Prof Ebroul Izquierdo

Research group(s): Multimedia and Vision

Motion Capture (MoCap) has been used for decades in animation studios to record human motion and replicate or apply such movements to any character in animated films or games. Famous movies as Avatar exploited MoCap technology in many of its scenes. Due to the relatively high cost of hardware and software to accurately track human motion, till very recently this technology has been confined to professional studios. With the arrival of inexpensive (commodity) RGB-D cameras/sensors as the Kinect II a new frontier in more efficient, accurate and affordable animation creation has been opened. This PhD project aims at building on the outcomes of the REVERIE project (http://www.reveriefp7.eu/) which was (technically) coordinated by the MMV Group at QMUL. The aim is to develop more accurate, more stable and more efficient algorithms for character puppeting and animation using autonomously calibrated multi-Kinect II sensors or similar commodity hardware. Sought candidates should be able to show talent in combining artistic design of virtual characters with computer vision and graphics techniques and programming skills for the development of improved software tools for MoCap and highly efficient and realistic character animation.