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Outline

The system can be broken up into three modules: Unlike other models that use thermal imaging to obtain the user's silhouette [7], the Virtual Kathakali system uses a visible-light monochrome camera against a black background. The user's silhouette is obtained by dynamically binarizing the images and the 3-D positions of the user's shoulder, elbow and the wrists are obtained in real time from the image coordinates. This compact data is then transmitted to a local or off-site virtualization system in real time. Also, by using skin-tone colour/greyscale information, it is possible to identify occlusion, which is not possible to do in thermal imaging systems. The overall cost of this system is likely to be several times less than that of other comparable systems used in Virtual Metamorphosis systems.

The next phase is to create an articulated 3D model that will follow the user's poses and reflect the traditional costumes of a classical Indian dance form such as the Kathakali. The 3D model needs to have appropriate motion constraints at the joints and suitable dress/headgear/texture. The 3D arm pose sequence is now communicated to the graphics model, which recreates it as an animated graphics display. In this process, the very low-bandwidth joint angle data can be used to animate the 3D Dancer model.