Image and Vision Computing

Computers should be able to detect and track the articulated 3D pose of a human being moving through a video sequence. Incremental tracking methods often prove slow and unreliable, and many must be initialized by a human operator before they can track a sequence. This paper describes a simple yet effective algorithm for tracking articulated pose, based upon looking up observations (such as body silhouettes) within a collection of known poses. The new algorithm runs quickly, can initialize itself without human intervention, and can automatically recover from critical tracking errors made while tracking previous frames in a video sequence.