Inverse Skinning

Skinning is the name given to the technique whereby a polygon skin is derived from an underlying articulating skeleton. We reverse this process, starting with a collection of points positioned on the surface of a character and then generating an underlying skeleton using a constrained optimisation approach. We call this inverse skinning. The surface data is collected from an optical motion capture system, but could also be derived from other capture processes. The technique presented is tolerant to erroneous data and is suitable for streaming datasets due to the per- frame nature of the process.