Human bodies and clothing deform in complex ways and exhibit interesting dynamics. To study and model 3D shapes in motion we acquired a unique 4D scanner that captures the full 3D human body shape at 60 frames per second. Provided by 3dMD (Atlanta, GA), the system uses 22 pairs of stereo cameras, 22 color cameras, and speckle-light projectors. The speckle patterns allow accurate stereo reconstruction of 3D shape. This speckle pattern alternates at 120fps with large white-light LED panels that provide a smooth nearly uniform illumination. Each frame in the “4D movie” is a 3D mesh with approximately 150,000 points.

This facility enables us to study body shape in motion, understand how bodies deform, and to capture the dynamics of soft tissue motions at high spatial and temporal resolution. With the world’s first temporal 3D dense surface full body scanner we have captured bodies in motion in ways that have never been seen before. Our custom protocols and software are providing new insights into body shape and motion for graphics, medicine, psychology, and computer vision.

With this scanner we have captured hundreds of thousands of 3D scans. Processing this data to make it useful involves registering a 3D template mesh to all the scans in a process we call 4Cap, for 4D motion capture. Our current research focuses on extending these techniques to accurately capture the 4D motions of clothing on the body.