Animating human bodies becomes one of the most active research fields in virtual human modeling. Animating an articulated three dimensional human model currently requires manual rigging to specify its internal skeletal structure and to define how the input motion deforms its surface. Manual rigging is too tedious

and sensitive to the pose of the model. So in this paper

we present an automatic pose-independent method to extract skeleton of human model. This method based on geodesic distance of human body model first extracts and recognizes five feature points at the end points of head and limbs on human body surface

and calculates the geodesic distances of vertices in the model from the feature points. It then constructs the central lines through the centers of geodesic distance isolines

and finds joint positions by analyzing the angles or circularity function of geodesic isolines of the model according to bent or unbent joints. Our experiments show that

this method can identify joint positions and extract the skeleton automatically

with high precision

and in a pose-independent manner.