Motion capture and retargeting of fish by monocular camera

Accurate motion capture and flexible retargeting of underwater creatures such as fish remain to be difficult due to the long-lasting challenges of marker attachment and feature description for soft bodies in the underwater environment. Despite limited new research progresses appeared in recent years, the fish motion retargeting with a desirable motion pattern in real-time remains elusive. Strongly motivated by our ambitious goal of achieving high-quality data-driven fish animation with a light-weight, mobile device, this paper develops a novel framework of motion capturing and retargeting for a fish. We capture the motion of actual fish by a monocular camera without the utility of any marker. The elliptical Fourier coefficients are then integrated into the contour-based feature extraction process to analyze the fish swimming patterns. This novel approach can obtain the motion information in a robust way, with smooth medial axis as the descriptor for a soft fish body. For motion retargeting, we propose a two-level scheme to properly transfer the captured motion into new models, such as 2D meshes (with texture) generated from pictures or 3D models designed by artists, regardless of different body geometry and fin proportions among various species. Both motion capture and retargeting processes are functioning in real time. Hence, the system can simultaneously create fish animation with variation, while obtaining video sequences of real fish by a monocular camera.