Recognizing and Tracking Human Action

Human activity can be described as a sequence of 3D body postures. The traditional approach to recognition and 3D reconstruction of human activity has been to track motion in 3D, mainly using advanced geometric and dynamic models. In this paper we reverse this process. View based activity recognition serves as an input to a human body location tracker with the ultimate goal of 3D reanimation in mind. We demonstrate that specific human actions can be detected from single frame postures in a video sequence. By recognizing the image of a person’s posture as corresponding to a particular key frame from a set of stored key frames, it is possible to map body locations from the key frames to actual frames. This is achieved using a shape matching algorithm based on qualitative similarity that computes point to point correspondence between shapes, together with information about appearance. As the mapping is from fixed key frames, our tracking does not suffer from the problem of having to reinitialise when it gets lost. It is effectively a closed loop. We present experimental results both for recognition and tracking for a sequence of a tennis player.