A comparison of different methods for head measurements

Traditional univariate anthropometric studies document substantial human dimensions with a long history. With the development of new technologies such as laser scanning, the dimensions could be directly extracted from 3D scans. The SizeChina anthropometric survey gathered more than 2,000 3D head scans together with traditional head measurements in China. This study analysed the dimension differences between traditional method and 3D method in terms of head circumference, head length and head breadth. It is found that the results from all dimensions of the 3D scans are larger than the traditional measurements. The differences for females and young group are larger than those of males and older group respectively. These have to be considered when comparing direct measurement results with extracted anthropometric measures from scanned data.