A Tool Kit to Generate 3D Animated CAESAR Bodies

The Civilian American and European Surface Anthropometry Resource (CAESAR) database provides a comprehensive source for body measurement in numerous industries such as apparel, aerospace, and automobile. Generating animated CAESAR body sequences from still surface and landmark data will stimulate research and design in these areas. A tool kit has been developed to convert CAESAR bodies to models compliant with the Humanoid Animation specification (H-Anim). It will be helpful to set up a realistic motion capable humanoid library for application environment that can be reused in a wide variety of ergonomic applications.

The process consists of preprocessing the mesh, building a skeleton structure, creating segments of the body, assigning weights for vertices, and integrating motion capture data. Publicly available software is adopted for mesh compression and hole filling. C programs were developed to implement the translation from CAESAR body data to H-Anim. The technical issues involved in the process are discussed, and experimental results are shown in the paper.