3-D human pose recovery using nonrigid point set registration and body part tracking of depth data

In this paper, we present a novel approach for recovering a 3-D pose from a single human body depth silhouette using nonrigid point set registration and body part tracking. In our method, a human body depth silhouette is presented as a set of 3-D points and matched to another set of 3-D points using point correspondences. To recognize and maintain body part labels, we initialize the first set of points to corresponding human body parts, resulting in a body part-labeled map. Then, we transform the points to a sequential set of points based on point correspondences determined by nonrigid point set registration. After point registration, we utilize the information from tracked body part labels and registered points to create a human skeleton model. A 3-D human pose gets recovered by mapping joint information from the skeleton model to a 3-D synthetic human model. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation results on synthetic and real data show that complex human poses can be recovered more reliably with lower errors compared to other conventional techniques for 3-D pose recovery.