Modeling Skin Deformation Using Boundary Element Method

Modeling human skin deformation has many applications in the areas of computer graphics and human biomechanics. Nevertheless, most of the existing deformation approaches are too simple to be applied in biomedical applications. Although anatomy-based approach can determine the skin deformation based on the change in geometry of underlying layers, it is usually time-consuming to determine the geometrical change of each anatomical layer. This article presents a physics-based approach to model human skin deformation using boundary element method (BEM). Given the magnitude of displacement between the skin layer and the underlying skeleton at the anatomical landmarks, the approach determines the displacement of each vertices of the human skin model by using the BEM. We demonstrated our results by modeling the skin deformation of human lower limb with jumping and walking motions. Experimental results have shown that the proposed method can deform the skin layer at interactive frame rates.