Abstract: | Human motion tracking from monocular image sequences has been explored widely. However, a framework that addresses the variety of sensing conditions is lacking. In this paper, we present a simple, efficient, and robust method for recovering plausible 3D motion from a video without knowledge of the cameras parameters. Our method transforms the motion capture problem into a convex problem and employs a hierarchical geometrical solver for the minimization. This algorithm was applied to numerous synthetic and real image sequences with very encouraging results. Specifically, our results indicate that it can handle challenges posed by variation of lighting, partial self-occlusion, and rapid motion.Published online: 21 October 2004 |