Abstract: Most existing methods for animating a human body require a lot of manual work, and only deal with human body in some specific poses. We present a novel automated method for animating human bodies. Firstly, five feature points at the end points of head and limbs on human body surface are automatically extracted and recognized. Secondly, by taking the feature points as source points, the geodesic distance isolines on the surface are calculated and the central lines are subsequently constructed. Thirdly, along the central lines, joint positions are roughly determined based on the anthropometry knowledge, and then the joint positions are refined using kinematic characteristics of skeleton and motion data. Forthly, the skin attachment is made by solving for heat equilibrium. Finally, we match the extracted skeleton to motion data by aligning local coordinate frames and then animate the human body using motion data. Experiment results demonstrate that our method is pose-independent and fully automated, and can generate more realistic animation than previous methods.