this article we focus on the study of the gestures of a person, but the same methodology could be applied to the study of robots motions or of other kinds of articulated objects. Some examples of applications are listed in the table 1.

The problem of tracking a varying number of non-rigid objects has two major di#culties. First, the observation models and target distributions can be highly non-linear and non-Gaussian. Second, the presence of a large, varying number of objects creates complex interactions with overlap and ambiguities. To surmount these di#culties, we introduce a vision system that is capable of learning, detecting and tracking the objects of interest. The system is demonstrated in the context of tracking hockey players using video sequences. Our approach combines the strengths of two successful algorithms: mixture particle filters and Adaboost. The mixture particle filter [17] is ideally suited to multi-target tracking as it assigns a mixture component to each player. The crucial design issues in mixture particle filters are the choice of the proposal distribution and the treatment of objects leaving and entering the scene.

We present a method for recovering 3D human body motion from monocular video sequences using robust image matching, joint limits and non-self-intersection constraints, and a new sample-andrefine search strategy guided by rescaled cost-function covariances. Monocular 3D body tracking is challenging: for reliable tracking at least 30 joint parameters need to be estimated, subject to highly nonlinear physical constraints; the problem is chronically illconditioned as about 1/3 of the d.o.f. (the depth-related ones) are almost unobservable in any given monocular image; and matching an imperfect, highly flexible, self-occluding model to cluttered image features is intrinsically hard. To reduce correspondence ambiguities we use a carefully designed robust matching-cost metric that combines robust optical flow, edge energy, and motion boundaries. Even so, the ambiguity, nonlinearity and non-observability make the parameter-space cost surface multi-modal, unpredictable and illconditioned, so minimizing it is difficult. We discuss the limitations of CONDENSATION-like samplers, and introduce a novel hybrid search algorithm that combines inflated-covariance-scaled sampling and continuous optimization subject to physical constraints. Experiments on some challenging monocular sequences show that robust cost modelling, joint and self-intersection constraints, and informed sampling are all essential for reliable monocular 3D body tracking.

Shape-From-Silhouette (SFS), also known as Visual Hull (VH) construction, is a popular 3D reconstruction method which estimates the shape of an object from multiple silhouette images. The original SFS formulation assumes that all of the silhouette images are captured either at the same time or while the object is static. This assumption is violated when the object moves or changes shape. Hence the use of SFS with moving objects has been restricted to treating each time instant sequentially and independently. Recently we have successfully extended the traditional SFS formulation to refine the shape of a rigidly moving object over time. Here we further extend SFS to apply to dynamic articulated objects. Given silhouettes of a moving articulated object, the process of recovering the shape and motion requires two steps: (1) correctly segmenting (points on the boundary of) the silhouettes to each articulated part of the object, (2) estimating the motion of each individual part using the segmented silhouette. In this paper, we propose an iterative algorithm to solve this simultaneous assignment and alignment problem. Once we have estimated the shape and motion of each part of the object, the articulation points between each pair of rigid parts are obtained by solving a simple motion constraint between the connected parts. To validate our algorithm, we first apply it to segment the different body parts and estimate the joint positions of a person. The acquired kinematic (shape and joint) information is then used to track the motion of the person in new video sequences.

We describe a tracker that can track moving people in long sequences without manual initialization. Moving people are modeled with the assumption that, while configuration can vary quite substantially from frame to frame, appearance does not. This leads to an algorithm that firstly builds a model of the appearance of the body of each individual by clustering candidate body segments, and then uses this model to find all individuals in each frame. Unusually, the tracker does not rely on a model of human dynamics to identify possible instances of people; such models are unreliable, because human motion is fast and large accelerations are common. We show our tracking algorithm can be interpreted as a loopy inference procedure on an underlying Bayes net. Experiments on video of real scenes demonstrate that this tracker can (a) count distinct individuals; (b)identify and track them; (c) recover when it loses track, for example, if individuals are occluded or briefly leave the view; (d) identify the configuration of the body largely correctly; and (e) is not dependent on particular models of human motion.

Particle filters are used for hidden state estimation with nonlinear dynamical systems. The inference of 3-d human motion is a natural application, given the nonlinear dynamics of the body and the nonlinear relation between states and image observations. However, the application of particle filters has been limited to cases where the number of state variables is relatively small, because the number of samples needed with high dimensional problems can be prohibitive. We describe a filter that uses hybrid Monte Carlo (HMC) to obtain samples in high dimensional spaces. It uses multiple Markov chains that use posterior gradients to rapidly explore the state space, yielding fair samples from the posterior. We find that the HMC filter is several thousand times faster than a conventional particle filter on a 28D people tracking problem.

Vision-based motion capturing of hand articulation is a challenging task, since the hand presents a motion of high degrees of freedom. Model-based approaches could be taken to approach this problem by searching in a high dimensional hand state space, and matching projections of a hand model and image observations. However, it is highly inefficient due to the curse of dimensionality. Fortunately, natural hand articulation is highly constrained, which largely reduces the dimensionality of hand state space. This paper presents a model-based method to capture hand articulation by learning hand natural constraints. Our study shows that natural hand articulation lies in a lower dimensional configurations space characterized by a union of linear manifolds spanned by a set of basis configurations. By integrating hand motion constraints, an efficient articulated motion-capturing algorithm is proposed based on sequential Monte Carlo techniques. Our experiments show that this algorithm is robust and accurate for tracking natural hand movements. This algorithm is easy to extend to other articulated motion capturing tasks.

Finding people in pictures presents a particularly difficult object recognition problem. We show how to find people by finding candidate body segments, and then constructing assemblies of segments that are consistent with the constraints on the appearance of a person that result from kinematic properties. Since a reasonable model of a person requires at least nine segments, it is not possible to inspect every group, due to the huge combinatorial complexity. We propose two

A major difficulty for 3D human body tracking from monocular image sequences is the near non-observability of kinematic degrees of freedom that generate motion in depth. For known link (body segment) lengths, the strict non-observabilities reduce to twofold ‘forwards/backwards flipping ’ ambiguities for each link. These imply 2 # links formal inverse kinematics solutions for the full model, and hence linked groups of O(2 # links) local minima in the model-image matching cost function. Choosing the wrong minimum leads to rapid mistracking, so for reliable tracking, rapid methods of investigating alternative minima within a group are needed. Previous approaches to this have used generic search methods that do not exploit the specific problem structure. Here, we complement these by using simple kinematic reasoning to enumerate the tree of possible forwards/backwards flips, thus greatly speeding the search within each linked group of minima. Our methods can be used either deterministically, or within stochastic ‘jump-diffusion ’ style search processes. We give experimental results on some challenging monocular human tracking sequences, showing how the new kinematic-flipping based sampling method improves and complements existing ones.

We present an integrated system for automatic acquisition of the human body model and motion tracking using input from multiple synchronized video streams. The video frames are segmented and the 3D voxel reconstructions of the human body shape in each frame are computed from the foreground silhouettes. These reconstructions are then used as input to the model acquisition and tracking algorithms.