TR#415: Dynamic Models of Human Motion

Christopher R. Wren and Alex Pentland

Edited version published in:
the Proceedings of the Third IEEE International
Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition,
Nara, Japan, April 14-16, 1998.

This paper describes experiments in human motion understanding, defined here as estimation of the physical state of the body (the Plant) combined with interpretation of that part of the motion that cannot be predicted by the plant alone (the Behavior). The described behavior system operates in conjunction with a real-time, fully-dynamic, 3-D person tracking system that provides a mathematically concise formulation for incorporating a wide variety of physical constraints and probabilistic influences. The framework takes the form of a non-linear recursive filter that enables pixel-level, probabilistic processes to take advantage of the contextual knowledge encoded in the higher-level models. Results are shown that demonstrate both qualitative and quantitative gains in tracking performance.

HTML version .


Last modified: Thu Sep 17 14:24:17 EDT 1998