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By: Dr. Nicola D'Apuzzo
Homometrica Consulting
Zurich, Switzerland
www.homometrica.ch ABSTRACT
This paper presents an overview of 3D body scanning technologies with applications to the fashion and apparel industry.
Complete systems for the digitization of the human body exist since more than fifteen years. One of the main users of this technology with application in the textile field was the military industry. In fact, body scanning technology is being successfully employed since many years in military bases for a fast selection of the correct size of uniforms for the entire staff. Complete solutions were especially developed for this field of application. Many different research projects were issued for the exploitation of the same technology in the commercial field. Experiments were performed and start-up projects are to time running in different parts of the world by installing full body scanning systems in various locations such as shopping malls, boutiques or dedicated scanning centers. Everything is actually ready to be exploited and all the required hardware, software and solutions are available: full body scanning systems, software for the automatic and reliable extraction of body measurements, e-kiosk and web solutions for the presentation of garments, high-end and low-end virtual-tryon systems. However, complete solutions in this area have still not yet found the expected commercial success. Today, with the on-going large cost reduction given by the appearance of new competitors, methods for digitization of the human body becomes more interesting for the fashion and apparel industry. Therefore, a large expansion of these technologies is expected in the near future.
To date, different methods are used commercially for the measurement of the human body. These can be divided into three major distinguished groups: laser-scanning, projection of light patterns, combination modeling and image processing. The different solutions have strengths and weaknesses that profile their suitability for specific applications. This paper gives an overview of their differences and characteristics and expresses clues for the selection of the adequate method. A special interest is given to practical examples of the commercial exploitation of human body digitization with applications to the fashion and apparel industry.
Key words: 3D surface scanning, laser scanning, white light projection, human body
1. INTRODUCTION
Complete systems for the digitization of the human body exist since more than fifteen years. One of the main users of this technology was the movie industry. Its visual effects had to appear more and more realistic and this was not possible any more by using computer graphics only. A new idea stuck: replace the real actors with virtual ones. A representative example is the movie Teminator 2, which was turned in 1991, already fifteen years ago. At that time, the cost of a full body scanner was still over 400'000 US$. The military industry had also these equipments, but its application was primarily ergonomics: seats of combat airplanes could, for example, be fitted exactly to pilots.
New methods and techniques were continuously developed for the digitization of the human body and new tools were introduced for a more efficient use of the resulting data. The number of available solutions increased. With the possibility of a massive cost reduction given by the new technologies, human body digitization became interesting also to other fields of application. With the time, the different solutions profiled themselves more clearly with their strengths and weaknesses. For the selection of the adequate solution for a specified application, it is therefore important to know deeply their characteristics and differences.
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