Abstract
The foot is a vital human body part comprising a complex system of muscles and bones sustaining the human weight, and providing balance and mobility when daily activities are being performed. Extracting accurate foot measurements is of paramount importance in many applications including medical sciences, sports and fashion industry. Traditionally, footwear brands employ contact-based foot measuring methods involving a trained operator to design and produce well-fitted footwear products. However, this process is very time consuming and is prone to human errors. With the advancement of 3D scanning technologies, the foot can be scanned accurately with an affordable 3D scanning device. In this research, we propose, to the best of our knowledge, the first deep neural network (FNet) for automatic foot measurement extraction from a 3D foot point cloud. The proposed FNet is an encoderdecoder neural network which operates on the foot point cloud and outputs the foot reconstruction as well as the corresponding measurements points utilized for measurement extraction. Our study shows that teaching the network to accurately generate the measurement points, performed with the help of the well-designed loss functions, is necessary for automatic and accurate foot measurement extraction. In order to train the proposed neural network, a large dataset of complete foot scans with their corresponding measurement points and measurement values are synthesized. The performance of the proposed method has been evaluated on both synthetic test data as well as the real scans captured by the Occipital Structure Sensor Pro. The results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and speed.
Pengpeng Hu
Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor)
Pengpeng Hu is currently a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) with The University of Manchester. His research interests include biometrics, geometric deep learning, 3D human body reconstruction, point cloud processing, and vision-based measurement. He serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, and Engineering and Mathematics in Medical and Life Sciences, as well as an Academic Editor for PLOS ONE and a member of the editorial board for Scientific Reports. He is also the Programme Chair for the 25th UK Workshop on Computational Intelligence (UKCI 2026) and an Area Chair for the 35th British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC 2024). He is the recipient of the Emerald Literati Award for an outstanding paper in 2019.