Realistic 3D Models of Humans are widely demanded in many fields such as production design

computer animation and virtual reality. A low cost method based on shape from silhouette is presented to construct a virtual human. Only one digital camera is used to take photos of a human from different position. Each view is calibrated individually with a calibration pattern placed on the ground. From these obtained calibrated camera views

the volume model of a person is estimated using shape-from-silhouette approach. An algorithm of surface reconstruction is used to extract the surface of the person from volume model. After texture mapping with original camera views

the realistic 3D Model of the person is obtained. In order to make the result model more realistic

some advanced techniques like texture filtering and texture synthesis are applied to the textured 3D model. Compared with some active scanning methods such as laser scanning and structured lights

the running experiment results show that this approach is very efficient and the accuracy is good enough.