Unsupervised learning of human motion

An unsupervised learning algorithm that can obtain a probabilistic model of an object composed of a collection of parts (a moving human body in our examples) automatically from unlabeled training data is presented. The training data include both useful "foreground" features as well as features that arise from irrelevant background clutter - the correspondence between parts and detected features is unknown. The joint probability density function of the parts is represented by a mixture of decomposable triangulated graphs which allow for fast detection. To learn the model structure as well as model parameters, an EM-like algorithm is developed where the labeling of the data (part assignments) is treated as hidden variables. The unsupervised learning technique is not limited to decomposable triangulated graphs. The efficiency and effectiveness of our algorithm is demonstrated by applying it to generate models of human motion automatically from unlabeled image sequences, and testing the learned models on a variety of sequences

Monocular Perception of Biological Motion in Johansson Displays

Computer perception of biological motion is key to developing convenient and powerful human–computer interfaces. Algorithms have been developed for tracking the body; however, initialization is done by hand. We propose a method for detecting a moving human body and for labeling its parts automatically in scenes that include extraneous motions and occlusion. We assume a Johansson display, i.e., that a number of moving features, some representing the unoccluded body joints and some belonging to the background, are supplied in the scene. Our method is based on maximizing the joint probability density function (PDF) of the position and velocity of the body parts. The PDF is estimated from training data. Dynamic programming is used for calculating efficiently the best global labeling on an approximation of the PDF. Detection is performed by hypothesis testing on the best labeling found. The computational cost is on the order of N^4 where N is the number of features detected. We explore the performance of our method with experiments carried on a variety of periodic and nonperiodic body motions viewed monocularly for a total of approximately 30,000 frames. The algorithm is demonstrated to be accurate and efficient

Monocular Perception of Biological Motion in Johansson Displays

this paper was partially published in the Proceedings of ICCV'99 and in the Proceedings of ECCV'00 ######## Computer perception of biological motion is key to developing convenient and powerful humancomputer interfaces. Algorithms have been developed for tracking the body; however, initialization is done by hand. We propose a method for detecting a moving human body and for labeling its parts automatically in scenes that include extraneous motions and occlusion. We assume a Johansson display, i.e. that a number of moving features, some representing the unoccluded body joints and some belonging to the background are supplied in the scene. Our method is based on maximizing the joint probability density function (PDF) of the position and velocity of the body parts. The PDF is estimated from training data. Dynamic programming is used for calculating eciently the best global labeling on an approximation of the PDF. Detection is performed by hypothesis testing on the best labeling found. The computational cost is on the order of # where N is the number of features detecte