Capturing animal 3D articulated shape and appearance from images

Animals are widespread in nature and the analysis of their shape and motion is of importance in many fields and industries. Modeling 3D animal shape, however, is difficult because the 3D scanning methods used to capture human shape are not applicable to wild animals or natural settings. In our previous SMAL model, we learn animal shape from toys figurines, but toys are limited in number and realism, and not every animal is sufficiently popular for there to be realistic toys depicting it. What is available in large quantities are images and videos of animals from nature photographs, animal documentaries, and webcams. In this talk I will present our recent work for capturing the detailed 3D shape of animals from images alone. Our method extracts significantly more 3D shape detail than previous work and is able to model new species using only a few video frames. Additionally, we extract realistic texture map from images for capturing both animal shape and appearance.