Monocular 3D Tracking of Articulated Human Motion in Silhouette and Pose Manifolds

This paper presents a robust computational framework for monocular 3D tracking of human movement. The main innovation of the proposed framework is to explore the underlying data structures of the body silhouette and pose spaces by constructing low-dimensional silhouettes and poses manifolds, establishing intermanifold mappings, and performing tracking in such manifolds using a particle filter. In addition, a novel vectorized silhouette descriptor is introduced to achieve low-dimensional, noise-resilient silhouette representation. The proposed articulated motion tracker is view-independent, self-initializing, and capable of maintaining multiple kinematic trajectories. By using the learned mapping from the silhouette manifold to the pose manifold, particle sampling is informed by the current image observation, resulting in improved sample efficiency. Decent tracking results have been obtained using synthetic and real videos