A Method for Describing Human Body Forms

A new method is proposed for describing human body forms. Human bodies have been measured mainly by Martin's anthropometrical method and body forms have been represented by Martin's measures or indices derived from them. But these cannot reconstruct the original body forms although they describe some features of the human body. The proposed method not only overcomes this defect but enables body forms to be processed as patterns and to be analysed quantitatively. In this paper body form is defined as shape of silhouette curves and some other well-defined curves on a human body projected on a vertical plane. Body form is represented by sequences of nodes on these body curves. The nodes are extracted from the body curves through a curve dividing algorithm so that linear interpolating splines passing through them can reconstruct the original body curves within a certain error. In this sense the obtained node sequences can be said to describe the body form. The node extracting procedure was applied to the fifteen body curves defined on the front and side views of 347 Japanese women aged 5 to 54 years. Generally the body form of young grils could be represented with a smaller number of nodes than that of older women. Based on the results 173 node locations were determined that can describe body forms of 99% or more women. It was shown that body forms can be reconstructed with remarkable accuracy by interpolating the above 173 nodes using parabolic splines developed by the authors instead of inear splines. It was also shown that an average body form can be drawn by arithmetically averaging the coordinates of the corresponding nodes among body curves.