A kinematic model for Bayesian tracking of cyclic human motion

We introduce a two–dimensional kinematic model for cyclic motions of humans, which is suitable for the use as temporal prior in any Bayesian tracking framework. This human motion model is solely based on simple kinematic properties: the joint accelerations. Distributions of joint accelerations subject to the cycle progress are learned from training data. We present results obtained by applying the introduced model to the cyclic motion of backstroke swimming in a Kalman filter framework that represents the posterior distribution by a Gaussian. We experimentally evaluate the sensitivity of the motion model with respect to the frequency and noise level of assumed appearance–based pose measurements by simulating various fidelities of the pose measurements using ground truth data.