Shadow Theatre: Discovering Human Motion from a Sequence of Silhouettes

摘要

Shadow theatre is a genre of performance art in which the actorsrnare only visible as shadows projected on the screen. The goal ofrnthis study is to generate animated characters, the shadows of whichrnmatch a sequence of target silhouettes. This poses several challenges.rnThe motion of multiple characters are carefully coordinatedrnto form a target silhouette on the screen, and each character’s posernshould be stable, balanced, and plausible. The resulting characterrnanimation should be smooth and coherent spatially and temporally.rnWe formulate the problem as nonlinear constrained optimizationrnwith objectives, which were designed to generate plausible humanrnmotions. Our optimization algorithm was primarily inspired by thernheuristic strategies of professional shadow theatre actors. Theirrnknow-how was studied and then incorporated into our optimizationrnformulation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approachrnwith a variety of target silhouettes and 3D fabrication of the results.