Body tracking in human walk from monocular video sequences

This paper proposes a method to automatically track human body parts in the context of gait modelisation and recognition. The proposed approach is based on a five points human model (head, hands, and feet) where the points are detected and tracked independently. Tracking is fully automatic (no manual initialization of the five points) since it will be used in a real-time surveillance system. Feet are detected in each frame by first finding the space between the legs in the human silhouette. The issue of feet self-occlusion is handled using optical flow and motion correspondence. Skin color segmentation is used to find hands in each frame and tracking is achieved by using a bounding box overlap algorithm. The head is defined as the mass center of a region of the upper silhouette.