Tracking of Human Body Joints using Anthropometry

We propose a novel approach for tracking of human joints based on anthropometric constraints. A human is modeled as a pictorial structure consisting of body landmarks (joints) and corresponding links between them. Anthropometric constraints relate the landmarks of two persons if they are in the same posture. Given a test video, where an actor performs the same action as in a model video, and joint locations in the model video, anthropometric constraints are used to determine the epipolar lines, where the potential joint locations are searched in the test video. The edge templates around joints and related links are used to locate joints in the test video. The performance of this method is demonstrated on several different human actions

1. Introduction

Tracking of human joints is one of the important tasks in computer vision due to the vast area of applications. These applications include surveillance, human-computer interaction, action recognition, athlete performance analysis, etc. Joints tracking is a hard problem, since the appearance changes significantly due to non-rigid motion of humans, clothing, view point, lighting etc., therefore, appearance alone is not enough for successful tracking. We propose a novel approach for 2D joints tracking in a single uncalibrated camera using anthropometric constraints and known joint locations in a model video.