Space-Time Body Pose Estimation in Uncontrolled Environments

We propose a data-driven, multi-view body pose estimation algorithm for video. It can operate in uncontrolled environments with loosely calibrated and low resolution cameras and without restricting assumptions on the family of possible poses or motions. Our algorithm first estimates a rough pose estimation using a spatial and temporal silhouette based search in a database of known poses. The estimated pose is improved in a novel pose consistency step acting locally on single frames and globally over the entire sequence. Finally, the resulting pose estimation is refined in a spatial and temporal pose optimization consisting of novel constraints to obtain an accurate pose. Our method proved to perform well on low resolution video footage from real broadcast of soccer games.