Patent ID: 7308332

Claim:
A virtual clothing modeling apparatus comprising: a camera to obtain an image sequence including a plurality of images of a person who tries on clothing; a storage unit to store clothes data including three-dimensional figures of clothes and patterns thereof, three-dimensional figure data of the person, and posture data of the person; a posture-estimating unit to estimate the posture of the person in the images within the image sequence by using the image sequence and the stored posture data; a time series posture data generating unit to generate time series posture data by using the estimated posture data of the person; a clothes-simulating unit to estimate the motions of the clothes tried on by the person by using the three-dimensional figure data of the person, the clothes data, and the time series posture data; a clothes image-generating unit to generate images of the clothes based on the estimated motions of the clothes; and a synthesizing unit to synthesize images of the clothes on the person in the image sequence by using the estimated motions of the clothes and the clothes data; wherein the posture-estimating unit includes: a candidate mode selecting unit to select posture data for a plurality of posture candidates which are similar to the previously estimated posture data of the person; a candidate model generating unit to generate a plurality of candidate models by forming three-dimensional figure data using a plurality of posture data candidates; and a present posture-estimating unit to estimate the present posture of the person based on evaluation values which indicate similarities between the person in the images and the candidate models; wherein the previously estimated posture data is selected from posture data representing a plurality of postures; and wherein the posture data candidates selected by the candidate mode selecting unit are candidates whose similarities exceed a threshold.