Department of Intelligent Media, ISIR, Osaka Univ.

Digital Entertainment

Omnidirectional theater and instant casting for digital cinema

Omnidirectional Theater

We propose a novel wearable imaging system that can capture omnidirectional movies from the viewpoint of the camera wearer. The imaging system solves the problems of resolution uniformity and gaze matching that conventional approaches do not address. We combine cameras with curved mirrors that control the projection of the imaging system to produce a uniform resolution. The use of the mirrors also enables the viewpoint to be moved closer to the eyes of the camera wearer, thus reducing gaze mismatching. The optics, including the curved mirror, have been designed to form an objective projection. The capability of the designed optics is evaluated with respect to resolution, aberration, and gaze matching. We have developed a prototype based on the designed optics for practical use. The capability of the prototype and effectiveness of first-person perspective omnidirectional movies were demonstrated through quantitative evaluations and presentation experiments to ordinary people, respectively..

Publications
  1. K.Kondo, Y.Mukaigawa, Y.Yagi, “Wearable Imaging System for Capturing Omnidirectional Movies from a First-person Perspective”, In Proc. VRST2009, Nov., 2009.

Facial Skin Measurement

The characteristic of human skin depends on the age and gender. In this paper, we statistically analyze skin characteristics based on the large-scale database of about 1000 people in a wide age range to find the differences of skin characteristics in personality. Since skin is translucent, the incident ray on the skin surface is divided into reflection and scattering. That is, some rays reflect on the surface while the other rays scatter into the media. In our method, we first acquire the reflection component and scattering component from facial images. Translucency of skin is analyzed by calculating the proportion of both components. Then, the reflection component is divided into diffuse reflection and specular reflection. We analyze how oily the skin is by calculating the specular strength. Facial images among people of overall ages were taken with a measurement system including three projectors and two cameras. The characteristic of the facial image is calculated and the skin characteristic which depends on age and gender is statistically analyzed.

Online Gait Measurement for Digital Entertainment

This paper presents a method to measure online the gait features from the gait silhouette images and reflect the gait features to CG characters for an audience-participation digital entertainment. First, both static and dynamic gait features are extracted from the silhouette images captured by the online gait measurement system with two cameras and a chroma-key background. Then, Standard Gait Models (SGMs) with various types of gait features are constructed and stored, which are composed of a pair of CG characters’ rendering parameters and synthesized silhouette images. Finally, blend ratios of the SGMs are estimated to minimize gait feature errors between the blended model and the online measurement. In an experiment, a gait database with 100 subjects is used for gait feature analysis and it is confirmed that the measured gait features are reflected to the CG character effectually.

Publications
  1. M. Okumura, Y. Makihara, S. Nakamura, S. Morishima, and Y. Yagi, “The Online Gait Measurement for the Audience-Participant Digital Entertainment,” Proc. of Invited Workshop on Vision Based Human Modeling and Synthesis in Motion and Expression, Xi’an, China, Sep. 2009. [PDF]
  2. S. Nakamura, M. Shiraishi, S. Morishima, M. Okumura, Y. Makihara, and Y. Yagi, “Characteristic Gait Animation Synthesis from Single View Silhouette,” Proc. of SIGGRAPH 2009 (Poster), New Orieans, Louisiana, USA, Aug. 2009. [PDF]