Full body tracking using an agent-based architecture

We present an agent-based full body tracking and 3D animation system to generate motion data using stereo calibrated cameras. The novelty of our approach is that agents are bound to body-part (bone structure) being tracked. These agents are autonomous, self-aware entities that are capable of communicating with other agents to perform tracking within agent coalitions. Each agent seeks for ldquoevidencerdquo for its existence both from low-level features (e.g. motion vector fields, color blobs) as well as from its peers (other agents representing body-parts with which it is compatible), and it also combines the knowledge from high-level abstraction. Multiple agents may represent different ldquocandidatesrdquo for a body-part, and compete for a place within a coalition that constitutes the tracking of an articulated human body. The power of our approach is the flexibility by which domain information may be encoded within each agent to produce an overall tracking solution. We demonstrate the effectiveness of tracking system by testing actions (random moving and walking).