Modelling of joint angle limits for ICP-based body tracking

Human Motion Capture (HMC) is an active topic of research with applications in diverse domains. The robotics community is in particular interested in methods which allow the tracking of human movements on autonomous robotic systems with their constrained perception and processing capabilities. One approach for such a tracking is based on the Iterative Closest Points (ICP) algorithm. A specific problem of ICP-based tracking systems is the modelling of constraints and limits to limb movements, which are necessary to make sure that only anatomically possible body configurations are found. In this paper, we will present an approach to model joint limits in a way which allows the direct integration into an ICP-based tracking framework. This way, the compliance of the tracking results with e.g. anatomical limits of human body configurations is intrinsically ensured. The results show that this method provides a fast and robust way to achieve more consistent results.