Towards detection of human motion

Detecting humans in images is a useful application of computer vision. Loose and textured clothing, occlusion and scene clutter make it a difficult problem because bottom-up segmentation and grouping do not always work. We address the problem of detecting humans from their motion pattern in monocular image sequences; extraneous motions and occlusion may be present. We assume that we may not rely on segmentation or grouping and that the vision front-end is limited to observing the motion of key points and textured patches in between pairs of frames. We do not assume that we are able to track features for more than two frames. Our method is based on learning an approximate probabilistic model of the joint position and velocity of different body features. Detection is performed by hypothesis testing on the maximum a posteriori estimate of the pose and motion of the body. Our experiments on a dozen of walking sequences indicate that our algorithm is accurate and efficient