2021 2nd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Computer Engineering (ICAICE)
An Image-based Measuring Technique for the
Prediction of Human Body Size
Xin Pei
2021 2nd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Computer Engineering (ICAICE) | 978-1-6654-2186-7/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ICAICE54393.2021.00153
The Idol Group
Fudan University
Shanghai, China
peixin@mengxiang.com
Jing Zhao
The Idol Group
Shanghai, China
Zhaojing01@mengxiang.com
Abstract—To achieve high prediction accuracy of human body
keeps an open issue for decades of years, especially when COVID
comes and online retail becomes the major consumption channels.
The body measurement is the key to solve cloth matching and
recommendation in clothing e-commerce. This paper proposes a
practical framework of image-based body measurement, by only
taking the user’s front and side photos. This framework does not
require pure background or precise standing position, and
supports manual modification of the measurement results. The
framework takes people’s height, weight and gender as params to
initialize a common body size set, and corrects each part of the set
by analyzing the body proportion via the front and side images.
The prediction accuracy was tested with the 50 digital models and
10 real people. Results showed that the circumference sizes such as
chest, waist, hips, have errors less then 5%, while the length sizes
such as arm, leg approach to actual length on net body models. For
real people, the errors depend on the wearing clothes. In addition
to high accuracy, the method has a rapid process speed, reaching
19QPS on a NVIDIA RTX5000 GPU server.
Keywords-body measurement, body size, body model, image-
based
I. INTRODUCTION
Traditionally, body measurement is only provided by
expensive customized services, through tailor measuring on site.
Besides, the data of tailored size will only be reserved in the
merchant’s local storage. In the field of e-commerce clothing,
40% of returns are due to improper size, according to sales and
after sales statistic. Staking user body size means the abilities
of personalized customization and accurate recommendation.
Once the user registers with his/her own body size, the e-
commerce platform will be able to filter unfitted cloth styles
and the ones that lacks his/her size, thus to achieve “fit, then
style”. Meanwhile, the recommendation will be no longer
decided only by what the user viewed and paid, but what fits
his/her size and body shape, as well as preferred brand and price.
Above are the advantages for selling stoke clothes, knowing
user body size also contributes to digital production and
universal customization. In future garment manufacturing,
designers will generate digital 3D cloth and count the payments
by pre-selling via the e-commerce platforms. The production
orders are re-organized in the form of precise size requirement
Supported by a grant from the Core Technology R&D of Lin-Gang.
978-1-6654-2186-7/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICAICE54393.2021.00153
Authorized licensed use limited to: UNIVERSITI TEKNOLOGI MARA. Downloaded on December 07,2023 at 17:02:48 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
Sitong Wu
The Idol Group
Shanghai, China
wusitong@mengxiang.com
Chunyan Lin
The Idol Group
Shanghai, China
linchunyan@mengxiang.com
sheet, instead of large-scale and blind production. Thus, the on-
demand production will bring up energy saving and solve cloth
overstock.
There are two principal pattens for body measurement, the
facility-based measurement and image-based measurement.
Facility also has two sub-categories, visible-light based and
milli-wave based measuring devices. The form of visible-light
sizing device always seems a box, containing a group of camara
such as Kinect [1]. It requires the participant to wear specific
tight clothing, so as to detect the outline of human body. In
order to provide an easy way to body measurement, a solution
that applies milli-wave is brought up, which adopts the wave
reflection mechanism, which is used in airport security.
Participant can just wear as normal, and the milli-wave can
penetrate cloth but will be reflected by human body. The
scanned result is millions-point cloud of the participant’s net
body. However, the milli-wave based measuring device is quite
expensive, more than ten times of visible-light based devices.
The advantage of facility-based measurement is accuracy,
but obviously, the mass production and wide-spread
deployment are costly. Most of users and their families,
especially for younger generations, prefer an armchair body
measurement application. With the help of computer vision
technology and deep learning, the image-based measurement
can provide a method by only taking photos on cellphones.
Based on trained body-net (e.g., SMPL [2]), it is possible to
restore the 3D model of the human body from a single image.
The measurement can be implemented by marking points on the
specified lines in the OBJ files. This method is fantastic, since
people can not only get a set of body size information, but also
a visible 3D model of him/her self. However, it costs a lot of
GPU resources and storage. The other way is the analysis the
images in 2D view, which requires both front and side photos.
The difficulties of this method are person recognition, body part
segmentation, combined processing of front and side images,
and the model constructions for different body-part
measurement. 2D view measuring method is relatively fast and
resource saving, but above difficulties make it hard to reach an
accurate measuring result.
This paper proposes an 2D image-based body measurement
framework, which applies a serious of computer vision and
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deep learning methods to solve above difficulties. The
recognition of tested person is achieved by analyzing the
continuous humanoid image from the central point in the image.
Then, the segmentation of body parts relies on the recognition
of body skeleton points, using the COCO body model [3]. The
processing of front and side images is executed by a mapping
scheme, which relates each of the front bode skeleton key points
to the side ones, in order to calculate the deformation rate of
each body part. Then, this framework modeled the dimensional
measurements for each body part, composed of lines, rectangles,
and ellipses. Moreover, in order to reduce the influence of
clothing and long hair on the measurement results, users are
suggested to input their height, weight and gender, so that the
framework can establish a reference manikin and figure out the
benchmark of sizing results [4]. Additionally, the
measurements will be recorded as histories when user re-
measure, and keep encrypted unless user’s decryption.
II. RELATED WORKS
Several solutions have been proposed to perform automated
human body measurement from multiple images [5], scanners
[6, 7], or depth cameras [8]. These proposals can be classified
into “tight” and “loose” measuring by the status of dressed
clothes.
Using 3D body scanners to produce body models is a
common solution. Some key body points and measurements are
estimated from the scanned body models [9, 10]. Bodylabs [11]
uses a single depth camera for measurements while wearing
tight clothes, which can provide more than 50 measurements of
a scanned body, taken from four different angles. Scanner based
measuring scheme is accurate when people wear tight cloth, but
it is quite inconvenient for users to don tight on site.
In terms of wearing loose measurement, Balan and Black
[12, 13] propose the use of multiple cameras. The user wears
loose clothes and needs to capture a series of poses. The
solution relies on a dataset of human bodies to estimate body
shape under clothing. Huang et al. [14] use a single camera to
estimate the body size that wear loose clothes. But their
proposal requires to capture a series of poses in high scale
motion, in order to figure out the key boundaries of body. Tong
et al. [15] propose a system using multiple Kinect cameras to
create a more precise model of a person. Nevertheless, they do
not focus on taking measurements. To improve the accuracy of
the body measurements, machine learning approaches have
been investigated. Statistical learning models are built to predict
real measurements from estimated measurements [16].
Moreover, a large number of approaches to estimate the type of
body shapes have been proposed [17]. However, it is inaccurate
to decide the user body measurement under loose clothes by
only taking one image as input, without the depth perception or
body proportion information.
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III. THE MAIN FRANMEWORK
The proposed image-based body measurement framework
is show in figure 1, which consists of six main modules. The
image fault-tolerance character relies on the ability of
processing complex input images. The proposed framework
supports multi-person and arbitrary background input, and the
only requirement is the tested person must stand at center
position.
Module 1. Photographing module. This can be easily
achieved by a general cellphone app or on WeChat-applet. It
calls the mobile phone camera to take photos of the tested
person. The mobile phone is required to be perpendicular to the
ground to obtain people’s front and side photos.
Module 2. Background removal module. This module can
recognize the people standing at central position, and remove
all the background other than the tested person in the photo
through machine learning method. The highlight of this
construction is strongly fault-tolerant, which means the
accurate exclusion of other persons and pixels of the complex
background. This is achieved by convergence of human shape
recognition and edge continuity detection, and could be built as
a general preprocessing module for any human modeling
projects.
Module 3. Body skeleton points recognition module. By
deploying the OpenPose [3] as a service, the framework can
identify and detect the position of body skeleton points and
make posture detection, including eyes, nose, neck, shoulders,
arms, hands, wrists, hips, knees, feet, as well as the record of
pixel coordinates (x, y) of these points in the photos. Both the
front and side photos are detected and marked with skeleton
points by this module.
Module 4. Body segmentation module. According to the
skeleton points data, the body in the photo can be segmented.
For example, the pixel points located between the hips and feet
will be categorized into leg part, while the chest and waist lie in
the region ranging from the lines of shoulders and legs,
separated by the proportion of upper body. Finally, the human
image is reformed, and each part of the human body is marked
in different colors.
Module 5. Body evaluation module. The 3D-human-body-
shape project [4], leverages MICE technique for missing data
imputation to pose a reshaping system for accurate and realistic
3D human bodies from anthropometric parameters (e.g., height,
weight, gender, etc.), which enables automatic modeling and
measurement for each body facet. Our framework adopts this
system to generate more than 20,000 body instances by
enumerating different combinations of height, weight and
gender, where each data item contains 8 dimensions of body
size, as shown in Figure 3. The proposed framework requires
users to manually input their height, weight and gender so as to
match the closest body index.
 Figure 1. The proposed framework of image-based body measurement

Module 6. Body measurement module. According to the
segmentation of human body parts, the body size is measured
through image processing. The foot length, arm length, sleeve
length and shoulder width are measured as linear length which
are directly calculated via the body parts proportion of height in
the front photo. Assuming the height of the person in the photo
is H pixel, the height of input is h, so that the ratio of the photo
is r = h / H. The actual length corresponding to each pixel of the
human body in the image can be calculated, and the pixel length
L of shoulder width can be multiplied by r to get the measured
result.
However, for the measurement of circumference, such as
chest, waist, hip and neck, requires joined analysis of front
photo and side photo. This framework adopts the elliptical
models for approximate circumference measuring. From the
front and side photos, we can obtain the length and width of the
ellipse respectively. Via model optimization, the approximate
ellipse model with coefficients is more accurate than the normal
ellipse, and is used to reduce size error.
Finally, the framework gets two sets of body size data, the
matched set and the measured set. By assigning proper weight
to both sets with regarding of real body constraints, our
framework presents the final predicted body size.
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Figure 2 illustrates the construction of standard human body
and the circumference measurement models. The standard 3D
body model is generated by Clo3D[18], where the front, side
and back images is shown in row one, while the transverse
section of waist, hip and chest is shown in row two.
We can roughly regard the waist curve of the human body
as the combination of two ellipses. The horizontal line divides
the waist into two parts, the abdomen(front) and the back. Since
the abdomen is easy to accumulate fat, the thickness of the
abdomen is greater than the back. The length of the horizontal
line in this figure is the waist width W of the human body, and
the length of the vertical line is the waist thickness H of the
human body, where and is divided and calculated via
W perpendicular to the tangent line.
The approximate circumference formula of a known ellipse
is:
               (1)
 The circumference calculation of hip is as similar as the
waist, while the bound of hip is a long semi axes ellipse.
On the other hand, the measurement of chest is different.
Through multiple groups of real tests, we found that using an
ellipse model or an approximate circumference model cannot
reach an accurate result, due to the shape of chest model tends
to a rounded trapezoid. For the convenience of calculation, we
   adopt a rectangle model instead, where the width and height are
 represented by and . is the multiplication of W and
a variable , which is set to 89% for male 92% for female.
Similarly, is the multiplication of H and a variable ,
which is set to 96% for male 92.5% for female. The two
proportions are given by best practice of real tests on 10 males
and 10 females. Thus, the circumference of chest is measured
   as:
Figure 2. The standard 3D model generated by Clo3D and the                   (4)
circumference models of waist, hip and chest
 From user view, his/her body measurement result is shown
Where represents the length of the long half axis and in Figure 3, which is writable, and each correction will feed
represents the length of the short half axis, i.e., corresponding back to improve the measurement module. Based on the
to and in the figure respectively. As shown in the accurate body size, our framework will be able to analyze the
figure 2, the waist circumference curve of human body can be user’s body shape (e.g., hourglass, rectangle, apple etc.) and
regarded as two ellipses with equal long axis and unequal short generate a 3D model on demand, even with the tested person’s
axis. The long axis of the ellipse is equal to W, and the short real face under his/her authorization. This model will be the 1:1
semi axes of the ellipse corresponding to the abdomen and back clone of the person, and can be presented in AR scenario for
are represented by and respectively, and meet the cloth try-on.
following requirements:
IV. EXPERIMENTS AND EFFECTS
                 (2) This section will illustrate the details of the conducted
Thus, we can get the circumference of waist curve fitted by experiments from aspects of measurement accuracy and
double ellipse: calculation performance.
A. Measurement accuracy analysis
        (3) In order to evaluate the accuracy of our proposal, the
experiments involve four groups of tests, in which the shoulder
 width represents the length measurement dimension, and the
circumferences of waist, hip as well as chest verify the
constructed models of circle body parts.
The given tables are parts of factual tests, where 20 samples
are taken including 10 male models and 10 female models
ranging from 160cm to 185cm height and 45kg to 90kg weight.
All these human models are generated by clo3D software as
rigid bodies with fixed size of all dimensions, represented as the
Real(mm) Column in below tables. Besides, in order to test both
wearing in tight cloth and wearing in loose cloth, we generate
modal-cotton t-shirt and long- sleeved shirt with 100%cotton
for male models, and generate tight sportswear and lace dress
for female models, all in well- fitted sizes. The “Tight” and
“Loose” Columns mean the measured sizes wearing tight and
loose cloth, and the “T_error” and “L_error” represent the error
rate compared with the real body size.

Figure 3. The representation of body measurement



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 TABLE I. THE SHOULDER WIDTH MEASUREMENT RESULTS The measurement of hip size is similar to the result of waist.
Trial Gender Height Weight Real Tight T_error Loose L_error The errors are relatively small in both tight and loose wearing
1 F
(cm)
160
(kg)
45
(mm)
331
(mm)
348
(%)
+5.1
(mm)
347
(%)
+4.8
cases, due to all of the dressed models are rigid and the cloth
2 F 165 55 343 360 +4.9 358 +4.3 are made by soft material, while the hip outlines the curves of
3 F 172 50 339 359 +5.9 358 +5.5 the cloth.
4 F 175 52 342 359 +4.9 359 +5
5 F 177 60 349 367 +5.1 371 +6.3
6 M 170 60 344 361 +4.9 361 +4.9 TABLE IV. THE CHEST MEASUREMENT RESULTS
7 M 175 70 354 372 +5.0 372 +5.0
Trial Gender Height Weight Real Tight T_error Loose L_error
8 M 180 70 362 381 +5.2 382 +4.9 (cm) (kg) (mm) (mm) (%) (mm) (%)
9 M 185 75 368 386 +4.8 393 +7.6 1 F 160 45 815 841 +3.2 915 +12.3
10 M 185 90 381 400 +4.9 404 +6.0 2 F 165 55 867 867 0 949 +9.5
Both the T_error and L_error is positive and limited in 8% 3 F 172 50 807 831 +3.0 909 +12.7
error rate, due to the use of skeleton-points based measurement 4 F 175 52 811 805 -0.8 928 +14.4
5 F 177 60 857 900 +5.0 972 +13.5
model. The result is comprehensible, the same as other length 6 M 170 60 899 893 -0.6 973 +8.2
measurements such as arm length and leg length. 7 M 175 70 956 920 -3.7 1069 +11.8
8 M 180 70 949 946 -0.3 1075 +13.3
9 M 185 75 961 972 +0.9 998 +6.0
TABLE II. THE WAIST MEASUREMENT RESULTS 10 M 185 90 1062 1042 -1.9 1168 +10.2
Trial Gender Height Weight Real Tight T_error Loose L_error Wearing tight cloth makes little chest measurement error,
(cm) (kg) (mm) (mm) (%) (mm) (%)
1 F 160 45 659 676 +2.6 847 +28.5
since most of the error is caused by the looseness under arm.
2 F 165 55 709 720 +1.5 874 +23.2 Besides, the adoption of our rectangle model reduces the
3 F 172 50 637 678 +6.4 911 +27.3 L_error to approximate 10%.
4 F 175 52 643 694 +7.9 927 +28.6
5 F 177 60 686 704 +2.6 938 +22.1
6 M 170 60 737 748 +1.5 952 +29.2
Since the experiments take standard models as samples, the
7 M 175 70 797 813 +2.1 975 +22.3 evaluation results by taking height, weight and gender as input
8 M 180 70 785 834 +6.3 970 +23.6 are quite similar to the Real sizes, thus the final error which is
9 M 185 75 796 853 +7.2 988 +24.1
10 M 185 90 906 899 -0.8 989 +9.2
affected by a high weight of evaluation result seems not
According to the result, the accuracy of waist measurement persuasive. The experiments illustrate the absolute
has a great correlation with the real body shape. For fat person, measurement errors of dressed people by adopting the proposed
the cloth is almost sticking to the body, thus the measurement method, and this measured raw result can be further optimized
is closer to the fact. Note that there exists a negative T_error for by weighting method, cloth recognition method to obtain a
185/90 male model, this is due to the constructed waist closer result to real the size of a net body.
circumference model, and the cloth is wearing quite tight on this B. Performance analysis
model body.
Figure 4 shows the stress testing under 10, 20, 30, 50,
TABLE III. THE HIP MEASUREMENT RESULTS 100VU, and the results shows the maximum processing
capacity is around 19 queries per-second. The index of average
Trial Gender Height Weight Real Tight T_error Loose L_error
(cm) (kg) (mm) (mm) (%) (mm) (%) response time and 90% response time represent the user
1 F 160 45 915 926 +1.2 1021 +11.5 experience, which should be limited in 3 seconds. While the
2 F 165 55 995 1019 +2.4 1053 +6.8
3 F 172 50 965 973 +0.8 1098 +13.7 error rate is caused by packet loss or internal sequential disorder.
4 F 175 52 979 998 +1.9 1117 +14.0 To solve this, a retransmission mechanism is settled and the
5 F 177 60 1038 1045 +0.7 1130 +8.8 user is unaware of the errors.
6 M 170 60 1020 1050 +2.9 1120 +9.8
7 M 175 70 1089 1122 +3.1 1147 +5.3
8 M 180 70 1084 1128 +4.1 1174 +7.3
9 M 185 75 1120 1195 +6.7 1201 +7.2
10 M 185 90 1192 1202 +0.9 1228 +3.0


Figure 4. Stress testing of our proposal



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 V. CONCLUSIONS [16] Liu, K., Wang, J., Kamalha, E., Li, V., and Zeng, X. Construction of a
prediction model for body dimensions used in garment pattern making
The proposed body measurement framework uses well based on anthropometric data learning. The Journal of The Textile
trained models to execute parameter-based body matching and Institute 108, 2107–2114, 2017.
image-based measurement. It enables people to obtain their [17] K. Collings. The Foolproof Way to Find Out Your Real Body Type. http:
detail body size at home only by taking two photos on their //www.whowhatwear.com/how-to-find-body-shape-calculator/, 2018.
cellphone. Experiments show the advantages of the proposal in [18] Mu S , Cao W . Virtual Fashion Design with CLO3D[J]. Electronic ence
both measurement accuracy and calculation performance, & Technology, 2015.
ensuring that our system will be popularized in large scale of
users. This achievement founds the ability on constructing the
digital person from real. Meanwhile, it also builds a critical key
index for cloth selling and precise recommendation in e-
commerce platform. Next, we are striving to get through the
body measurement and automatic manikin establishment, thus
to contribute to augmented reality and metaverse visualization.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by a grant from the Core Technol
ogy Research and Development Program of Lin-Gang.
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