Remarks on human body posture estimation from silhouette image based on heuristic rules and Kalman filter

Abstract

This paper proposes a human body posture estimation method based on analysis of human silhouette and Kalman filter. The proposed method is based on both the heuristically extraction method of estimating the significant points of human body and the contour analysis of the human silhouette. The 2D coordinates of the human body's significant points, such as top of the head, and tips of feet, are located by applying the heuristically extraction method to the human silhouette, those of tips of hands are obtained by using the result of the contour analysis, and the joints of elbows and knees are estimated by introducing some heuristic rules to the contour image of the human silhouette. The estimated results are optimized and tracked by using Kalman filter. The proposed estimation method is implemented on a personal computer and runs in real-time. Experimental results show both the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed method for estimating human body postures.