Real-time human motion analysis based on analysis of silhouette contour and color blob

This paper presents real-time human motion analysis for human-machine interface. In general, man-machine ‘smart’ interface requires real-time human motion capturing systems without special devices or markers. Although vision-based human motion capturing systems do not use such special devices and markers, they are essentially unstable and can only acquire partial information because of self-occlusion. When we analyze full-body motion, the problem becomes severer. Therefore, we have to introduce a robust pose estimation strategy to deal with relatively poor results of image analysis. To solve this problem, we have developed a method to estimate full-body human postures, where an initial estimation is acquired by real-time inverse kinematics and, based on the estimation, more accurate estimation is searched for referring to the processed image. The key points are that our system combines silhouette contour analysis and color blob analysis for feature extraction to achieve robust feature extraction and that our system can estimate fullbody human postures from limited perceptual cues such as positions of a head, hands and feet, which can be stably acquired by feature extraction process. In this paper, we outline a real-time and on-line human motion analysis system.