Digital close range photogrammetry for 3D body scanning for custom-made garments

Among several biometric applications, one of those currently attracting great interest is the possibility of carrying out 3D digitisation of human individuals to analyse their physical characteristics. These characteristics can be used for several purposes, such as security, medicine and tailoring for custom-made clothing. In recent years, although the development of online 3D scanning systems has been accelerating fast, little work has been devoted to offline systems, which would be particularly suitable for the textile and clothing industries. In the present research the author presents a specially designed low-cost offline 3D body digitiser, based on digital close range photogrammetry. A specially designed photogrammetric 3D scanner of the human body is presented, featuring automatic image processing procedures. The scanning system consists of eight cameras with a resolution of 5 megapixels, equipped with 16 mm wide-angle lenses; there are four white-light illuminators, of 100 W each. Tests on a tailor's dummy and on whole human bodies are reported, demonstrating the usefulness of the technique for textile applications. The digitisations performed on human bodies generally yield worse results than the corresponding ones on the dummy, and full body digitisations are worse than corset digitisations owing to the lower point density and to target distortion. Nevertheless, the results are satisfactory for tailoring applications that do not require high accuracies.