Twist Based Acquisition and Tracking of Animal and Human Kinematics

This paper demonstrates a new visual motion estimation technique that is able to recover high degree-of-freedom articulated human body configurations in complex video sequences. We introduce the use and integration of a mathematical technique, the product of exponential maps and twist motions, into a differential motion estimation. This results in solving simple linear systems, and enables us to recover robustly the kinematic degrees-of-freedom in noise and complex self occluded configurations. A new factorization technique lets us also recover the kinematic chain model itself. We are able to track several human walk cycles, several wallaby hop cycles, and two walk cycels of the famous movements of Eadweard Muybridgeʹʹs motion studies from the last century. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first computer vision based system that is able to process such challenging footage.