Signal and Data Processing

Abstract: Nowadays, the animators give life to the fancy characters by making natural movements to organs of cartoon characters. To achieve this goal, movements of living individuals can be applied into cartoon characters. In this paper, a skeletal correspondence finding based method is proposed to transfer movement of a 2D character into a new character, where these two shapes have the same structural topology, approximately. Based on the given animation sequence of source character, each body part of this character is segmented according to a specific motion. In this case, an exact skeleton with defined joints will be achieved for source shape. The target character skeleton is obtained by automatic skeleton extraction algorithms. In this stage, by skeletal correspondence finding between source and target character, we can transfer skeleton deformation of each source body parts into target body parts. This deformation contains the values of skew, scale and orientation that are achieved from reference pose and deformed poses of source skeletons. Finally, to evaluate the proposed method efficiency, we perform it on 2D animation characters. The achieved results illustrate the ability of the algorithm in generating correct and natural motions for different variety of characters. The method is robust to the type of characters and can transfer variety of deformations.