Putting Real-World Objects into Virtual World: Fast Automatic Creation of Animatable 3D Models with a Consumer Depth Camera

Consumer depth cameras such as Kinect are gaining huge popularity due to their potential to real-time 3D surface reconstruction. The creation of tractable 3D object models from the reconstructed surface model, however, requires further processings for segmentation, mesh/texture generation, and skeletal rigging. Providing solutions for all these issues, this paper formulate a comprehensive framework for generating animatable 3D models of real-world objects using only a single depth camera, with no needs of any generic models and specific viewers. The proposed system enables easy creation of 3D models even for non-experts within a few minutes. As demonstrated in the experimental results, our system generates visually realistic 3D models and their plausible animations.