Efficient Human Posing and Morphing for Electromagnetic Analysis

ABSTRACT: Radio-frequency (RF) transmitting devices are found nearly everywhere today, ranging from lower-power cell phones to radar equipment to high-energy weapons systems. Accidental exposure of humans to the RF radiation emanating from these devices can cause harmful thermal effects including permanent tissue damage. Modeling these thermal effects across a whole population of humans is difficult and time consuming using todays tools and can constitute a very expensive phase during the design of RF transmitting equipment. We will meet this industry need by extending the armature-creation automation and flexible morphing prototypes we developed during Phase I, evolving them into high-quality commercial software products. We will upgrade the armature/posing tool to handle a broad array of human models and poses and include a feature that facilitates posing models in constrained environments. We will also develop the morphing capability to handle arbitrary, physics-based deformations that enable dimensions to be matched with those from anthropomorphic databases. Furthermore, we will design and implement a user-friendly graphical user interface that will enable the analyst to quickly and efficiently setup a morph and pose, to launch analysis tools, and to visualize the results. BENEFIT: The primary application of these new algorithms and tools will be to facilitate the development of safe designs for high powered RF systems and electronic countermeasures for customers in the Department of Defense (DoD), whose personnel may be exposed to stray RF radiation from these devices. The new posing and morphing capabilities will enable modeling and simulation of the effects of exposures to a wider array of body types and poses and at a lower cost than the very limited set of current human models can provide. In addition their role in the DoD, the posing capabilities will assist customers in the HVAC community who are designing the next generations of aircraft, vehicles, fabric, and clothing. A third application is in medicine, where the morphing capability can be used to provide detailed, physically-realistic models that cover various body shapes, internal organ shapes, and poses and can thus be used for medical education, preoperative planning, visualization, etc. Finally, this posing and morphing application will provide a synergism with our existing high-speed thermal modeling tools. The integrated software suite will provide thermal analysts from various industries with the ability to quickly perform broad parametric simulations of thermoregulatory response across whole populations of humans and in diverse poses.