Anyone Could have A Digitally Enhanced Body Now [Image]

In case you dislike the style you look on video, a new sort of image-manipulation software could make you’re feeling better about yourself.

Developed by Christian Theobalt of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany, and co-workers, it allows professional and amateur movie-makers to dramatically alter how muscular, leggy or heavy people appear on film. Beforehand this will only be done by laborious frame-by-frame retouching.

Theobalt’s team began by generating 3D scans of 120 people of varying size and shape in more than a few poses. By merging the scans, they were ready to create a single model which may be morphed from any body shape or pose to any other.

Turning to the video sequence containing the actor whose shape they want to govern, the team uses a mixture of off-the-shelf and bespoke software to track the actor’s silhouette during the scene. The software then maps the silhouette onto the morphable model, and tweaks it to generate the necessary height, weight, leg length or muscularity.

The technology has obvious applications in films like Raging Bull, for which Robert de Niro put on 27 kilograms in two months to portray his character. ” The actor wouldn’t want to go to all that trouble,” says Theobalt.

Cultural preference

It is also a price-saver for advertising companies. Because standards of beauty vary across cultures, it truly is the norm to shoot several adverts for a single product. With the brand new software, firms could make one film and tweak the model’s dimensions to suit different countries.

Although the implications are realistic, extreme alterations slightly distort a film’s background. To discovered whether it truly is distracting, Theobalt’s team asked 15 people to view an unaltered video while 15 others watched a version within which the actor’s body shape have been tweaked. There was no significant difference between the number of distortions the two groups reported, suggesting that this distortion won’t unduly worry audiences.

Daniel Cohen-Or of the faculty of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University, Israel, is developing an analogous technique that alters the illusion of folk in photographs . He is impressed by Theobalt’s software, but notes that it can not always be applicable. ” It requires a clear scene, meaning no occlusion or distracting objects,” he says.

The work will probably be unveiled in December at the computer graphics conference Siggraph Asia in Seoul, South Korea.

New Scientist reports, explores and interprets the implications of human endeavour set within the context of society and culture, providing comprehensive coverage of science and technology news.

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This post is tagged: advertising companies, frame by frame, image manipulation software, max planck institute, morphable model, software firms, video sequence