Articulated motion reconstruction from feature points

A fundamental task of reconstructing non-rigid articulated motion from sequences of unstructured feature points is to solve the problem of feature correspondence and motion estimation. This problem is challenging in high-dimensional configuration spaces. In this paper, we propose a general model-based dynamic point matching algorithm to reconstruct freeform non-rigid articulated movements from data presented solely by sparse feature points. The algorithm integrates key-frame-based self-initialising hierarchial segmental matching with inter-frame tracking to achieve computation effectiveness and robustness in the presence of data noise. A dynamic scheme of motion verification, dynamic keyframe-shift identification and backward parent-segment correction, incorporating temporal coherency embedded in inter-frames, is employed to enhance the segment-based spatial matching. Such a spatial–temporal approach ultimately reduces the ambiguity of identification inherent in a single frame. Performance evaluation is provided by a series of empirical analyses using synthetic data. Testing on motion capture data for a common articulated motion, namely human motion, gave feature-point identification and matching without the need for manual intervention, in buffered real-time. These results demonstrate the proposed algorithm to be a candidate for feature-based real-time reconstruction tasks involving self-resuming tracking for articulated motion. 2007 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.