Large Angle based Skeleton Extraction for 3D Animation
  In this paper, we present a solution for arbitrary 3D character deformation by investigating rotation angle of decomposition and preserving the mesh topology structure. In computer graphics, skeleton extraction and skeleton-driven animation is an active areas and gains increasing interests from researchers. The accuracy is critical for realistic animation and related applications. There have been extensive studies on skeleton based 3D deformation. However for the scenarios of large angle rotation of different body parts, it has been relatively less addressed by the state-of-the-art, which often yield unsatisfactory results. Besides 3D animation problems, we also notice for many 3D skeleton detection or tracking applications from a video or depth streams, large angle rotation is also a critical factor in the regression accuracy and robustness. We introduced a distortion metric function to quantify the surface curviness before and after deformation, which is a major clue for large angle rotation detection. The intensive experimental results show that our method is suitable for 3D modeling, animation, skeleton based tracking applications. 
Hugo Martin, Raphael Fernandez, Yong Khoo
cs.CV