Capturing Motion for Animation

Christoph Bregler
Computer Science Department
Stanford University

Time and Place

1305 Newell-Simon Hall
Refreshments 3:15 pm
Talk 3:30 pm

Abstract

We will survey our current research efforts on vision based capture and animation techniques applied to animals, humans, and cartoon characters. We will present new capture techniques that are able to track and infer kinematic chain and 3D non-rigid blend-shape models directly from 2D video data without the use of pre-tracked features and prior models. Furthermore we demonstrate how to use such motion capture data to estimate statistical models for synthesis and how to retarget motion to new characters. We show several examples on capturing kangaroos, giraffes, human body deformations, facial expressions, animating hops and walks with natural fluctuations, and retargeting expressive cartoon motion.

This reports on joint work with Kathy Pullen, Lorie Loeb, Lorenzo Torressani, Danny Yang, Gene Alexander, Aaron Hertzmann, Henning Biermann

Speaker Biography

Chris Bregler is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley in 1998 and his Diplom in Computer Science from Karlsruhe University in 1993. He also worked for several companies including IBM, Hewlett Packard, Interval, and Disney. He is a member of the Stanford Computer Graphics and the Robotics Laboratory. His primary research interests are in the areas of Vision, Graphics, and Learning. Currently he focuses on topics in visual motion capture, human face, speech, and body gesture analysis and animation, image/video based modeling and rendering, and artistic aspects of animation.

Speaker Appointments

For appointments, please contact Jianbo Shi (jshi@cs.cmu.edu).