1. We therefore propose in this paper on of the first systems in the literature to easily perform holistic manipulation of body attributes of human actors in video.
2. Video editors want to alter body attributes, but this can be computational intensive, and since body attributes are highly mutually correlated doing the edits locally doesn’t really work. How can we make holistic modifications of body
3. By creating a mesh/bone representation of the body, combining it with real scanning data, and using PCA to reduce the dimensionality of variations, you can holistically morph the human figure. Detect features in the figure on the film, find a model that fits, and use sliders modify the dimensions.
4. You can alter your actors digitally without having to force actors to gain/lose weight or otherwise do camera tricks to modify proportions. The fat suit budget for “Meet the Klumps III: Klump harder” would be drastically reduced. You’d also be able to film something like “The Hobbit” without having to make tall actors appear short using perspective trickery.
The paper’s examples of usage are making an actor in a scene in Baywatch more muscular, or making a basketball player thinner or fatter on the fly.
5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXSj4pcl9Ao shows some cool examples in motion, with a little more about the user interface of the actual reshape tool.