MiniMesh: Real-Time 5,000-Node Anatomical Human Body Mesh Reconstruction for Portable Devices

Daniel Mathew

When a person goes to check on a skin lesion or a runner wants to improve their form, a scanner is often used to track points on the body for measurements. Currently, there exists no solution that can instantaneously (in less than a second) compute the location of all these points at once. MiniMesh is a novel, resource-efficient algorithm that can accomplish this task on a small computer (like a phone or laptop) in real time from a single image. The algorithm takes an unorthodox approach of splitting this complex task into two simpler problems: finding the location of only 119 landmarks and extracting an outline from the patient’s image. After running these procedures, their output can be used to estimate the location of thousands of points which are displayed on the screen using a custom-made rendering engine. Overall, MiniMesh can process on average 20 images per second with high accuracy in all tasks. The speed of the algorithm can be improved to 50+ images per second when running each part of the algorithm parallelly. MiniMesh accomplishes what large motion capture systems can do using only a portable device, creating a fast, accurate, and inexpensive solution for all.