A puppet interface for the development of an intuitive computer animation system

In this paper, we introduce a puppet interface for the development of an intuitive animation system. Our puppet interface does not require any special devices and any type of puppet can be used. The puppet interface is developed by attaching ten visible markers onto a puppet. The user can manipulate the pose of the puppet interface to produce the desired motion in front of a camera. The puppet´s joint angle information is captured by the camera and used to retrieve a suitable motion from a motion database. The retrieved motion data is transferred to a 3D character model to generate an animation. To avoid the occlusion problem, we propose an algorithm that estimates the joint angle by determining the position and rotation of markers adjacent to the occluded marker. Experiments confirmed that our proposed algorithm can generate correct results, although some occluded markers remained.