Hedvig Sidenbladh
Michael Black
Leonid Sigal
This paper addresses the problem of probabilistically modeling 3D human motion for synthesis and tracking. Given the high dimensional nature of human motion, learning an explicit probabilistic model from available training data is currently impractical. Instead we exploit methods from texture synthesis that treat images as representing an implicit empirical distribution. These methods replace the problem of representing the probability of a texture pattern with that of searching the training data for similar instances of that pattern. We extend this idea to temporal data representing 3D human motion with a large database of example motions. To make the method useful in practice, we must address the problem of efficient search in a large training set; efficiency is particularly important for tracking. Towards that end, we learn a low dimensional linear model of human motion that is used to structure the example motion database into a binary tree. An approximate probabilistic tree search method exploits the coefficients of this low-dimensional representation and runs in sub-linear time. This probabilistic tree search returns a particular sample human motion with probability approximating the true distribution of human motions in the database. This sampling method is suitable for use with particle filtering techniques and is applied to articulated 3D tracking of humans within a Bayesian framework. Successful tracking results are presented, along with examples of synthesizing human motion using the model.
HS was sponsored by the Foundation for Strategic Research under the "Center for Autonomous Systems" contract. MJB was supported by the DARPA HumanID Project (ONR contract N000140110886) and by a gift from the Xerox Foundation.
Related Publications
Implicit probabilistic models of human motion for synthesis and tracking,
Sidenbladh, H., Black, M. J., and Sigal, L.,
European Conf. on Computer Vision, ECCV2002. A. Heyden, G. Sparr, M. Nielsen, and P. Johansen (Eds.), Springer-Verlag LNCS 2353, Vol. 1, pp. 784-800.
(postscript), (pdf).Stochastic tracking of 3D human figures using 2D image motion,
Sidenbladh, H., Black, M. J., and Fleet, D.J.,
European Conference on Computer Vision, D. Vernon (Ed.), Springer Verlag, LNCS 1843, Dublin, Ireland, pp. 702-718 June 2000.
(postscript)(pdf), (abstract)
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