About Us

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The Perceiving Systems Department is part of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. Our goal is to develop mathematical and computational models that formalize the principles of perception and enable computers to understand the visual world of surfaces, materials, light and movement.

This BMI visualizer is an outgrowth of our research on human body shape modeling, statistics, and perception. It uses a statistical model of human body shape created from thousands of detailed laser range scans of human bodies. From these bodies we analyze how human shape varies with age, weight, gender, etc. to create a mathematical model of body shape variability.

Portions of this research were performed at Brown University. This material is based, in part, upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. IIS-0812364.