Low Cost Video Animation of People using a RGBD Sensor

This paper is an investigation in a low cost solution for performing video animation using a Kinect v2 for Windows, where skeleton, depth and colour data are acquired for three different characters. Segmentation of colour and depth frames were based on establishing the range of a person in the depth frame using the skeleton information, and then train a plane of the floor and exclude points close to it. Transitioning between motions were based on minimizing the Euclidean distance between all feasible transitioning frames, where a source and target frame would be found. Intermediate frames were made to create seamless transitions, where new poses were found by moving pixels in the direction of the optical flow between the transitioning frames. The realism of the proposed animation was verified through a user study to have a higher rate of preference and perceived realism compared to no animation and animation using alpha blending.