Geodesic model of human body

Anthropometry is widely applied to the research in skeleton extraction from surface meshes of human body. Especially the anatomical proportion can be employed as a benchmark in model segmentation and joint extraction. Unfortunately, the anatomical proportion is usually measured with the Euclidean distance, which makes it difficult to correlate it with the surface mesh. To bridge this gap, we take advantage of the property of the geodesic metrics that is invariance to rotation, translation, scaling and model pose, and propose an original geodesic model in which the length of each part of human body is measured by geodesic metrics, by which the anatomic proportions can be directly mapped to the contours of the mesh surface of human body in arbitrary pose. Combining the geodesic model with automatic extraction of feature points, we can determine the candidate scopes of joint positions and boundaries between the parts on meshes, and then refine the joint positions in the scopes using existing methods. And finally, we illustrate the utility of the geodesic model with an application to joint extraction.