Vision-based human motion analysis: An overview

Markerless vision-based human motion analysis has the potential to provide an inexpensive, non-obtrusive solution for the estimation of body poses. The significant research effort in this domain has been motivated by the fact that many application areas, including surveillance, Human-Computer Interaction and automatic annotation, will benefit from a robust solution. In this paper, we discuss the characteristics of human motion analysis. We divide the analysis into a modeling and an estimation phase. Modeling is the construction of the likelihood function, estimation is concerned with finding the most likely pose given the likelihood surface. We discuss model-free approaches separately. This taxonomy allows us to highlight trends in the domain and to point out limitations of the current state of the art.