2.5D human pose estimation for shadow puppet animation

Abstract

Digital shadow puppet has traditionally relied on expensive motion capture equipments and complex design. In this paper, a low-cost driven technique is presented, that captures human pose estimation data with simple camera from real scenarios, and use them to drive virtual Chinese shadow play in a 2.5D scene. We propose a special method for extracting human pose data for driving virtual Chinese shadow play, which is called 2.5D human pose estimation. Firstly, we use the 3D human pose estimation method to obtain the initial data. In the process of the following transformation, we treat the depth feature as an implicit feature, and map body joints to the range of constraints. We call the obtain pose data as 2.5D pose data. However, the 2.5D pose data can not better control the shadow puppet directly, due to the difference in motion pattern and composition structure between real pose and shadow puppet. To this end, the 2.5D pose data transformation is carried out in the implicit pose mapping space based on self-network and the final 2.5D pose expression data is produced for animating shadow puppets. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our new method.