Three researchers (Arjun Jain, Thorsten Thorm¨ahlen, Hans-Peter Seidel and Christian Theobalt) at Germany’s Max Planck Institute have developed MovieReshape, a software program that can alter the images of people on the film in order to change their body type.
Abstract: A system for quick and easy manipulation of the body shape and proportions of a human actor in arbitrary video footage. The approach is based on a morphable model of 3D human shape and pose that was learned from laser scans of real people. The algorithm commences by spatio-temporally fitting the pose and shape of this model to the actor in either single-view or multi-view video footage. Once the model has been fitted, semantically meaningful attributes of body shape, such as height, weight or waist girth, can be interactively modified by the user. The changed proportions of the virtual human model are then applied to the actor in all video frames by performing an image-based warping. By this means, we can now conveniently perform spatio-temporal reshaping of human actors in video footage which we show on a variety of video sequences.
The software is still in development, and will not be officially debuted until Siggraph, the computer graphics conference in Seoul, South Korea that takes place in December.
The software will save costs in any instance where special effects can be employed, including in commercials, where one ad could be filmed, then the actor's body-type could be manipulated to meet local "standards of beauty".
For more information read reaearch paper (Adobe Acrobat PDF, 6.6 MB).
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