Classification of upper limb motion trajectories using shape features

To understand and interpret human motion is a very active research area nowadays because of its importance in sports sciences, health care, and video surveillance. However, classification of human motion patterns is still a challenging topic because of the variations in kinetics and kinematics of human movements. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm for automatic classification of motion trajectories of human upper limbs. The proposed scheme starts from transforming 3-D positions and rotations of the shoulder/elbow/wrist joints into 2-D trajectories. Discriminative features of these 2-D trajectories are, then, extracted using a probabilistic shape-context method. Afterward, these features are classified using a k-means clustering algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art techniques. © 2012 IEEE