Capturing Motion Skills with Silhouette-Based Numerical Pose Estimation

Svenja Kahn^*, Cornelius Malerczyk^‡, Holger Graf^* and Ulrich Bockholt^*

^(*) Fraunhofer IGD, Germany
^(‡) University of Applied Science Giessen-Friedberg
E-mail: svenja.kahn@igd.fraunhofer.de, cornelius.malerczyk@mnd.fh-friedberg.de, holger.graf@igd.fraunhofer.de, ulrich.bockholt@igd.fraunhofer.de

Abstract

The capturing of human movements is an important step for the analysis of human skills, e.g. for sports analysis or for learning-by-demonstration tasks. In this paper we introduce a new markerless pose estimation method which estimates human poses from silhouettes. The presented numerical pose estimation algorithm adapts a non-deterministical annealing schedule for silhouette based motion capturing. The pose is estimated by numerically minimizing the differences between the silhouettes of synthesized views of a 3D avatar and the silhouettes of the real person in the camera images. The evaluation results of simulation experiments quantify the trade-off between the accuracy and the execution time of the presented algorithm.