SPA: Sparse Photorealistic Animation Using a Single RGB-D Camera

Photorealistic animation is a desirable technique for computer games and movie production. We propose a new method to synthesize plausible videos of human actors with new motions using a single cheap RGB-D camera. A small database is captured in a usual office environment, which happens only once for synthesizing different motions. We propose a marker-less performance capture method using sparse deformation to obtain the geometry and pose of the actor for each time instance in the database. Then, we synthesize an animation video of the actor performing the new motion that is defined by the user. An adaptive model-guided texture synthesis method based on weighted low-rank matrix completion is proposed to be less sensitive to noise and outliers, which enables us to easily create photorealistic animation videos with new motions that are different from the motions in the database. Experimental results on the public data set and our captured data set have verified the effectiveness of the proposed method.