Recognizing human postures in video sequences using Contour-Point Signature

A research area in Computer Vision focuses on the identification of articulated objects, such as human actions and movements of the hand, which can be used in human-computer interaction, surveillance, and other tracking systems. Two problems arise: identify when two articulated objects in different stances are in the same class of objects, and differentiate the distinct positions of the same object. In both cases, it is necessary to know how correspond the different points or regions of such objects standing in different attitudes. This article presents the Contour-Point Signature; a point descriptor that allows to establish a method to achieve the better matching of points between two figures, and to thus obtain a transformation which relates them. A measure of dissimilarity between two figures for classifying various human postures in a video sequence is also defined.