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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: EP/M506801/1
Title: Fashion garment design, e-tailing and manufacturing with zero prototyping.
Principal Investigator: Hilton, Professor A
Other Investigators:
Guillemaut, Dr J
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department: Vision Speech and Signal Proc CVSSP
Organisation: University of Surrey
Scheme: Technology Programme
Starts: 20 October 2014 Ends: 19 April 2016 Value (£): 150,918
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Design & Testing Technology Manufacturing Machine & Plant
Materials Processing
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Manufacturing
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary on Grant Application Form
This project will carry out research to acquire the knowledge and skills required to simulate the behaviour of, and render

photorealistic fabric/garment, in real-time, to enable the design, e-tailing (electronic retailing on-line and in store) and

manufacturing of fashion clothing with zero physical prototypes. The innovation here is that no one today, anywhere in the

world, is delivering high quality, real-time fabric/garment behaviour simulation and photorealistic rendering matched to real

fabric. This UK project team brings together the experience in simulation, photorealistic rendering, fashion and computer

vision to make this a reality. This technology would enable new business models in the fashion industry, such that

garments could be offered to consumers prior to manufacture for interaction e.g. try-on and outfit mixing, and

personalisation e.g. fabrics, colours etc. before purchase. It would also encourage localised manufacture-on-demand to

meet shorter delivery times and support a revitalised UK fashion manufacturing economy. There are also applications for

this technology beyond the fashion industry, such as video games, movie production and advertising.

Over the past decade the University of Surrey, Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing has pioneered the

development of video-based surface motion capture to allow the acquisition of complex non-rigid motion of real surface

dynamics from multiple view video. Research has primarily focused on the use of surface motion capture to capture actor

performance to support video-realistic content production for film and interactive entertainment. Video-based

reconstruction of surface motion allows the acquisition of highly non-rigid surfaces such as the loose dress of a dancing

actor.

The goal of the proposed research is to exploit recent advances in surface motion capture to enable high-accuracy dense

reconstruction of garment motion. This is not possible with existing motion capture technologies which require the

placement of markers as tracking fiducials on the cloth surface affecting the natural cloth motion and only allowing motion

capture at sparse locations. A critical advance in this research will be verfication of the accuracy of video-based surface

motion capture for measurement of dense non-rigid cloth motion. This will open-up the potential exploitation of surface

motion capture in both the immediate application of garment design and wider application as a tool for video-based measurement of human soft-body surface motion in clinical applications ranging from biomechanics to non-invasive

monitoring of movement during medical imaging.

Application of surface motion capture to verification of physics-based cloth simulation will allow validation of methods

beyond their qualitative use as artistic tools for computer generated imagery in film production. Research will introduce

quantitative metrics for both direct evaluation of simple cloth motion under controlled conditions and full garment motion

capture where it is not possible to accurately measure the contact constraints driving the motion. This research will bridge

the gap between the real-world and physics-based simulation of complex dynamic scenes. Quantitative evaluation will

validate the use of cloth simulation in garment design enabling an end-to-end zero-prototyping process from design to

manufacture for the fashion industry.
Key Findings
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Potential use in non-academic contexts
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Impacts
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Summary
Date Materialised
Sectors submitted by the Researcher
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Project URL:  
Further Information:  
Organisation Website: http://www.surrey.ac.uk