Articulated Motion Tracking

This project involves work done at Compaq’s Cambridge Research Lab (formerly Digital Equipment Coporation) in the summer of 1997. It is an extension of Jim Rehg’s thesis work at CMU on visual tracking of a hand, and work is continuing in this area at Compaq. The following is our abstract, which can be found along with video demos and a conference report on the project’s web page.

In this project we analyze the use of kinematic constraints for articulated object tracking. Conditions for the occurrence of singularities in 3-D models are presented and their effects on tracking are characterized. We describe a novel 2-D Scaled Prismatic Model (SPM) for figure registration. In contrast to 3-D kinematic models, the SPM has fewer singularity problems and does not require detailed knowledge of the 3-D kinematics. We fully characterize the singularities in the SPM and illustrate tracking through singularities using synthetic and real examples with 3-D and 2-D models. Our results demonstrate the significant benefits of the SPM in tracking with a single source of video.