Estimation of 3-D human body posture via co-registration of 3-D human model and sequential stereo information

In this paper, we present a technique for estimating three-dimensional (3-D) human body posture from a set of sequential stereo images. We estimated the pixel displacements of stereo image pairs to reconstruct 3-D information. We modeled the human body with a set of ellipsoids connected by kinematic chains and parameterized with rotational angles at each body joint. To estimate human posture from the 3-D data, we developed a new algorithm based on expectation maximization (EM) with two-step iterations, assigning the 3-D data to different body parts and refining the kinematic parameters to fit the 3-D model to the data. The algorithm is iterated until it converges on the correct posture. Experimental results with synthetic and real data demonstrate that our method is capable of reconstructing 3-D human posture from stereo images. Our method is robust and generic; any useful information for locating the body parts can be integrated into our framework to improve the outcomes.