Validation of Smartphone-Based Photogrammetric 3D Body Scanning for Automated Anthropometric Measurements Compared with a Commercial Depth-Sensor-Based Body Scanner
Authors: Ruting Cheng, Boyuan Feng, Chuhui Qiu, Joaquin A. Calderon, Qing Pan, Yufan Liu, James K. Hahn
Abstract
3D body scanning has become an important tool in healthcare applications because of its rapid and non-invasive nature. While smartphone-based photogrammetric reconstruction provide a low-cost and accessible alternative to commercial 3D body scanners, their performance for whole-body scanning remains insufficiently validated. Thus, we designed this study to comprehensively validate the photogrammetric 3D scanning application by evaluating automatically extracted whole-body measurements and longitudinal body-shape monitoring. We evaluated a representative application, PolyCam, against the commercial depth-sensor-based Fit3D ProScanner using 144 pregnant participants scanned longitudinally throughout pregnancy. We designed an automatic circumference extraction pipeline to get measurements at four anatomical landmarks from paired 3D scans. A linear mixed-effects model was used to evaluate scanner effects and longitudinal body-shape changes. Measurement consistency was assessed using repeated PolyCam scans and tape measurements on a rigid mannequin. PolyCam demonstrated strong agreement with Fit3D, with average biases below 16 mm, intraclass correlation coefficients above 0.8, and Pearson correlation coefficients above 0.9 across all landmarks. Both systems captured comparable longitudinal body-shape changes. Mannequin experiments showed mean biases below 3.5 mm and no significant differences from tape measurements. These findings support smartphone photogrammetry as a potential accessible alternative to commercial body scanners and applicable for longitudinal 3D body-shape assessment.
Contactless body measurement technologies are becoming increasingly significant for smart health monitoring, digital health applications, and remote patient assessment. Traditional anthropometric measurements typically necessitate physical contact and trained personnel, which may constrain scalability in remote healthcare settings. In this study, we introduce a depth camera-based framework for estimating human body measurements utilizing 3D point cloud data. An Orbbec Astra 2 depth camera was employed to capture RGB images, depth maps, and 3D point clouds of participants. The captured point cloud was processed using Python-based tools, including Open3D, NumPy, and OpenCV, to segment the human body from the background. Key anthropometric measurements, such as height and arm span, were computed. The measurements were obtained through a combination of spatial filtering and landmark selection on the 3D point cloud, followed by the projection of the computed measurements onto the corresponding RGB image using camera intrinsic parameters. In addition to linear measurements, the approximate body volume and visible surface area were estimated using voxel-based occupancy analysis and mesh-based surface reconstruction methods. The experimental results from a single depth capture demonstrated that accurate body measurements and geometric estimates could be obtained from depth camera data without physical contact. This study provides a foundation for future real-time systems that integrate depth sensing with intelligent health monitoring and generative AI models for smart healthcare applications.
Fitting an underlying body model to 3D clothed human assets has been extensively studied, yet most approaches focus on either single-modal inputs such as point clouds or multi-view images alone, often requiring a known metric scale. This constraint is frequently impractical, especially for AI-generated assets where scale distortion is common. We propose OmniFit, a method that can seamlessly handle diverse multi-modal inputs, including full scans, partial depth observations, and image captures, while remaining scale-agnostic for both real and synthetic assets. Our key innovation is a simple yet effective conditional transformer decoder that directly maps surface points to dense body landmarks, which are then used for SMPL-X parameter fitting. In addition, an optional plug-and-play image adapter incorporates visual cues to compensate for missing geometric information. We further introduce a dedicated scale predictor that rescales subjects to canonical body proportions. OmniFit substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 57.1 to 80.9 percent across daily and loose clothing scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first body fitting method to surpass multi-view optimization baselines and the first to achieve millimeter-level accuracy on the CAPE and 4D-DRESS benchmarks.
Body shape and circumferences are clinically informative biomarkers for risk stratification, including measures such as waist to hip ratio, limb and trunk girths, yet conventional tools such as manual tape measures and optical scanners often require undressing and sustained poses. These demands slow workflows, compromise dignity, and exclude many older adults and people with limited mobility. To make measurement fast and contactless, we leverage millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar, which preserves privacy and operates through typical clothing, enabling quick full-body acquisition. In this work, we present a new optimization-based framework to recover 3D human shape and extract a comprehensive set of anthropometric measurements from volumetric mmWave data. Our method introduces a weighted registration pipeline that fits a parametric body model (SMPL) directly to the noisy mmWave point cloud. The core of our contribution is a vertex-weighting strategy that modulates a Chamfer energy function for reliable surface alignment and noise elimination. We further stabilize the fit by incorporating a foot-ground plane constraint and pose priors, optimizing directly for the SMPL parameters. Together, these components enable a fast, privacy preserving workflow that delivers high fidelity body shape and measurements through clothing without cameras or disrobing and with minimal cooperation, supporting frequent risk oriented assessments in clinics and care facilities for patients of all ages and mobility levels.
Miriam Senne, Benjamin D. Killeen, Christoph Baur +2