This thesis presents an efficient and biologically informed 3D human body morphing technique through data-driven alteration of standardized 3D models. The anthropometric data is derived from a large empirical database and processed using principal component analysis (PCA). Although techniques using PCA are relatively commonplace in computer graphics, they are mainly used for scientific visualizations and animation. Here we focus on uncovering the underlying mathematical structure of anthropometric data and using it to build an intuitive interface that allows the interactive manipulation of body shape within the normal range of human variation. We achieve weight/gender based body morphing by using PCA. First we calculate the principal vector space of the original data. The data then are transformed into a new orthogonal multidimensional space. Next, we reduce the dimension of the data by only keeping the components of the most significant principal vectors. We then fit a curve through the original data points and are able to generate a new human body shape by inversely transforming the data from principal vector space back to the original measuring data space. Finally, we sort the original data by the body weight, calculating males and females separately. This enables us to use weight and gender as two intuitive controls for body morphing. The Deformer program is implemented using the programming language C++ with OPENGL and FLTK API. 3D and human body models are created using Alias MayaTm.
