Cardboard People: A Parameterized Model of Articulated Image Motion

(with Shanon X. Ju and Yaser Yacoob)

We extend the work of Black and Yacoob on the tracking and recognition of human facial expressions using parameterized models of optical flow to deal with the articulated motion of human limbs. We define a "cardboard person model" in which a person's limbs are represented by a set of connected planar patches. The parameterized image motion of these patches is constrained to enforce articulated motion and is solved for directly using a robust estimation technique. The recovered motion parameters provide a rich and concise description of the activity that can be used for recognition. We propose a method for performing view-based recognition of human activities from the optical flow parameters that extends previous methods to cope with the cyclical nature of human motion. We illustrate the method with examples of tracking human legs over long image sequences.

Related Publications

Ju, S. X., Black, M. J., and Yacoob, Y., Cardboard people: A parameterized model of articulated motion, 2nd Int. Conf. on Automatic Face- and Gesture-Recognition, Killington, Vermont, Oct 1996, pp.38-44. (postscript)

Black, M. J., Yacoob, Y., and Ju, X. S., Recognizing human motion using parameterized models of optical flow, Motion-Based Recognition, Eds. Mubarak Shah and Ramesh Jain, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, pp. 245-269, 1997. (postscript)