Body Part Detection for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking

Accurate 3-D human body pose tracking from a monocular video stream is important for a number of applications. We describe a novel hierarchical approach for tracking human pose that uses edge-based features during the coarse stage and later other features for global optimization. At first, humans are detected by motion and tracked by fitting an ellipse in the image. Then, body components are found using edge features and used to estimate the 2D positions of the body joints accurately. This helps to bootstrap the estimation of 3D pose using a sampling-based search method in the last stage. We present experiment results with sequences of different realistic scenes to illustrate the performance of the method.