Detailed body shapes from flash photographs

We present a technique that enables capture of detailed body shapes for clothing and footwear design using off-the-shelf equipment. The main components of our acquisition system are a standard flash-equipped digital camera and a calibration plate. Detailed 3D shapes are recovered from flash photographs using multi-view version of photometric stereo. The key idea is to obtain lighting variation by moving the camera itself widely such that photometric stereo can be performed with a built-in flash, which is not achievable with traditional methods. To recover a body model from photographs, we employ a deformable model. Starting from a template mesh, we first deform this to fit a sparse set of markers and then silhouettes in the images. Finally, we refine the mesh to agree with normals estimated from shading using a novel efficient multi-view photometric stereo algorithm based on the deformation gradient fitting. Experimental results obtained using real and synthetic images show that the method provides an accurate model for clothing and footwear design merely using a digital camera. We also present a method for creating a customized shoe-last model from a captured foot model.