Tracking people interacting with objects

While the problem of tracking 3D human motion has been widely studied, most approaches have assumed that the person is isolated and not interacting with the environment. Environmental constraints, however, can greatly constrain and simplify the tracking problem. The most studied constraints involve gravity and contact with the ground plane. We go further to consider interaction with objects in the environment. In many cases, tracking rigid environmental objects is simpler than tracking high-dimensional human motion. When a human is in contact with objects in the world, their poses constrain the pose of body, essentially removing degrees of freedom. Thus what would appear to be a harder problem, combining object and human tracking, is actually simpler. We use a standard formulation of the body tracking problem but add an explicit model of contact with objects. We find that constraints from the world make it possible to track complex articulated human motion in 3D from a monocular camera.