Experimental study of skeleton tracking abilities from microsoft kinect non-frontal views

Human body motion tracking is important for a large variety of applications e.g., entertainment, human computer interaction, creative industry etc. Marker-based motion capture systems offer accurate motion tracking, however, they cannot be widely used due to their high cost and operational complexity. To this end, emerging depth sensing technologies, such as Microsoft Kinect, can be employed in many cases as an alternative low cost marker-less solution. Such sensors are mainly used to track the frontal view of the user, since it provides high tracking quality. To assess the potential tracking abilities of Kinect nonfrontal views, we compare the tracking results from four views (front, left side, right side, rear) with those from an off-the-self optical motion capture system. The experimental results show that the skeleton tracking accuracy of the rear view is close to the accuracy of the frontal view, although Kinect sensor cannot distinguish between the front and back sides of the user. In addition, the left and right side views can produce valuable tracking results for the body parts closer to each sensor.