Estimation of the location of joint points of human body from successive volume data

Recognizing structure of human body is important for modeling human motion. Human body is usually repre-sented as an articulate model, which consists of the rigid parts and the joint points between them. The structure of the human body is specified by the joint points. In this paper we propose a novel method for estimating the location of joint points from successive volume data. Our joint point estimation method consists of three steps. In the first step, rigid parts are extracted from two successive volume data under the constraint of the rigid transformation. In the second step, the joint points are estimated based on the rigid parts. As the last step, false joint points are eliminated by using more successive data. Applying the method to the simulated data, the locations of joint points of the human are correctly estimated.