Human Motion Tracking and Recognition

Abstract

Tracking and recognition of human motion has become an important research area in computer vision. In real-world conditions it constitutes a complicated problem, considering cluttered backgrounds, gross illumination variations, occlusions, self-occlusions, different clothing, and multiple moving objects. These ill-posed problems are usually tackled by simplifying assumptions regarding the scene or by imposing constraints on the motion. Constraints such as that the contrast between the moving people and the background should be high, and that everything in the scene should be static except for the target person, are quite often introduced in order to achieve accurate segmentation. Moreover, the motion of the target person is often confined to simple movements with limited occlusions. In addition, assumptions such as known initial position and posture of the person are usually imposed in tracking processes.