MoSculp: Interactive Visualization of Shape and Time

TL;DR

MoSculp introduces an interactive system that transforms videos into 3D motion sculptures, enabling detailed visualization of human motion in space and time, suitable for various rendering styles and accessible beyond professional artists.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel end-to-end system for automatic creation of 3D human motion sculptures from videos, combining 3D geometry estimation and image-based rendering.

Findings

Motion sculptures are more informative than traditional visualization methods.

The system automates a process previously limited to professionals.

User studies confirm improved understanding of motion.

Abstract

We present a system that allows users to visualize complex human motion via 3D motion sculptures---a representation that conveys the 3D structure swept by a human body as it moves through space. Given an input video, our system computes the motion sculptures and provides a user interface for rendering it in different styles, including the options to insert the sculpture back into the original video, render it in a synthetic scene or physically print it. To provide this end-to-end workflow, we introduce an algorithm that estimates that human's 3D geometry over time from a set of 2D images and develop a 3D-aware image-based rendering approach that embeds the sculpture back into the scene. By automating the process, our system takes motion sculpture creation out of the realm of professional artists, and makes it applicable to a wide range of existing video material. By providing viewers with 3D information, motion sculptures reveal space-time motion information that is difficult to perceive with the naked eye, and allow viewers to interpret how different parts of the object interact over time. We validate the effectiveness of this approach with user studies, finding that our motion sculpture visualizations are significantly more informative about motion than existing stroboscopic and space-time visualization methods.