Hierarchical part decomposition method of articulated body contour, and its application to human body motion measurement

Segmentation of an articulated object is one of the fundamental techniques of computer vision, and it can be applied to human body structure analysis and motion measurement. In this report, we propose a method that generates the contour model of each link element of an articulated object by using the hierarchical part decomposition (HPD) method of body contour. The HPD can divide the body region into characteristic elements without any model of link parameters or shape based on the distribution of high-curvature points of the object´s contour in the video sequence. Although the HPD only works under the restricted situation, the proposed method can also handle more general body motion by using the shape model of human body generated from the decomposed result. Experiment results of measuring the kip motion under real environment show that the proposed method can divide the body into characteristic elements and obtain postures of the body from the video sequence