3D human motion capture from monocular image sequences

This paper tackles the problem of estimating non-rigid human 3D shape and motion from image sequences taken by uncalibrated cameras. Similar to other state-of-the-art solutions we factorize 2D observations in camera parameters, base poses and mixing coefficients. Existing methods require sufficient camera motion during the sequence to achieve a correct 3D reconstruction. To obtain convincing 3D reconstructions from arbitrary camera motion, our method is based on a-priorly trained base poses. We show that strong periodic assumptions on the coefficients can be used to define an efficient and accurate algorithm for estimating periodic motion such as walking patterns. For the extension to non-periodic motion we propose our novel regularization term based on temporal bone length constancy. In contrast to other works, the proposed method does not use a predefined skeleton or anthropometric constraints and can handle arbitrary camera motion. Multiple experiments based on a 3D error metric demonstrate the stability of the proposed method. Compared to other state-of-the-art methods our algorithm shows a significant improvement.