Many attempts and contributions were made to make the human body modeling an easy and accessible task. We need to model the human body for several reasons; First, the classification of human bodies based on shape analysis allows the comparison between individuals and enables the distribution of the population for many purposes such as clothing and virtual dressing in shopping purposes.  Second, the virtual visualization and animation of human models and avatars are also beneficial in movies, and advertisement industries. Furthermore, these techniques prove to be essential in medical applications as well. An example of a medical application is the creation of orthotics and prosthetics designs.

Another example is monitoring the growth and the posture of the body to determine an adequate dose of prescribed medications. In this report, we present an overview of the literature on human body 3D modeling techniques and analyze each modeling technique's strengths and weaknesses. We also discuss the techniques of data acquisition of the CAESAR models which is a large database of 3D models of the human body. In addition, we discuss the most important methods used in 3D data representation and surface reconstruction. This work will help scientists and programmers better understand the different industries' technologies that use 3D modeling and scanning techniques of human bodies.