Vision-based 3-D tracking of humans in action
Dariu M. Gavrila · 1998
The ability to recognize humans and their activities by vision is essential for future machines to interact intelligently and effortlessly with a human-inhabited environment. Some of the more promising applications are discussed. A prototype vision system is presented for the tracking of whole-body movement using multiple cameras. 3-D body pose is recovered at each time instant based on occluding contours. The pose-recovery problem is formulated as a search problem and entails finding the pose parameters of a graphical human model whose synthesized appearance is most similar to the actual appearance of the real human in the multi-view images. Hermite deformable contours are proposed as a tool for the 2-D contour tracking problem. The main contribution of this dissertation is that it demonstrates for the first time a set of techniques that allow accurate vision-based 3-D tracking of arbitrary whole-body movement without the use of markers.