Fast capture of textured full-body avatar with RGB-D cameras

We present a practical system which can provide a textured full-body avatar within 3 s. It uses sixteen RGB-depth (RGB-D) cameras, ten of which are arranged to capture the body, while six target the important head region. The configuration of the multiple cameras is formulated as a constraint-based minimum set space-covering problem, which is approximately solved by a heuristic algorithm. The camera layout determined can cover the full-body surface of an adult, with geometric errors of less than 5 mm. After arranging the cameras, they are calibrated using a mannequin before scanning real humans. The 16 RGB-D images are all captured within 1 s, which both avoids the need for the subject to attempt to remain still for an uncomfortable period, and helps to keep pose changes between different cameras small. All scans are combined and processed to reconstruct the photorealistic textured mesh in 2 s. During both system calibration and working capture of a real subject, the high-quality RGB information is exploited to assist geometric reconstruction and texture stitching optimization.