In free-viewpoint video, the viewer can interactively choose his viewpoint in 3-D space to observe the action of a dynamic real-world scene from arbitrary perspectives. The human body and its motion plays a central role in most visual media and its structure can be exploited for robust motion estimation and efficient visualization. This paper describes a system that uses multi-view synchronized video footage of an actor's performance to estimate motion parameters and to interactively re-render the actor's appearance from any viewpoint.The actor's silhouettes are extracted from synchronized video frames via background segmentation and then used to determine a sequence of poses for a 3D human body model. By employing multi-view texturing during rendering, time-dependent changes in the body surface are reproduced in high detail. The motion capture subsystem runs offline, is non-intrusive, yields robust motion parameter estimates, and can cope with a broad range of motion. The rendering subsystem runs at real-time frame rates using ubiquous graphics hardware, yielding a highly naturalistic impression of the actor. The actor can be placed in virtual environments to create composite dynamic scenes. Free-viewpoint video allows the creation of camera fly-throughs or viewing the action interactively from arbitrary perspectives.

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Free-viewpoint video of human actors

A system and method of estimating the body shape of an individual from input data such as images or range maps. The body may appear in one or more poses captured at different times and a consistent body shape is computed for all poses. The body may appear in minimal tight-fitting clothing or in normal clothing wherein the described method produces an estimate of the body shape under the clothing. Clothed or bare regions of the body are detected via image classification and the fitting method is adapted to treat each region differently. Body shapes are represented parametrically and are matched to other bodies based on shape similarity and other features. Standard measurements are extracted using parametric or non-parametric functions of body shape. The system components support many applications in body scanning, advertising, social networking, collaborative filtering and Internet clothing shopping.

Method and apparatus for estimating body shape

Filtering based algorithms have become popular in tracking human body pose. Such algorithms can suffer the curse of dimensionality due to the high dimensionality of the pose state space; therefore, efforts have been dedicated to either smart sampling or reducing the dimensionality of the original pose state space. In this paper, a novel formulation that employs a dimensionality reduced state space for multi-hypothesis tracking is proposed. During off-line training, a mixture of factor analyzers is learned. Each factor analyzer can be thought of as a “local dimensionality reducer” that locally approximates the pose manifold. Global coordination between local factor analyzers is achieved by learning a set of linear mixture functions that enforces agreement between local factor analyzers. The formulation allows easy bidirectional mapping between the original body pose space and the low-dimensional space. During online tracking, the clusters of factor analyzers are utilized in a multiple hypothesis tracking algorithm. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm tracks 3D body pose efficiently and accurately , even when self-occlusion, motion blur and large limb movements occur. Quantitative comparisons show that the formulation produces more accurate 3D pose estimates over time than those that can be obtained via a number of previously-proposed particle filtering based tracking algorithms.

/pdf/monocular-tracking-of-3d-human-motion-with-a-coordinated-44x07r74z9.pdf

Monocular tracking of 3d human motion with a coordinated mixture of factor analyzers

Methods and arrangements involving portable user devices such smartphones and wearable electronic devices are disclosed, as well as other devices and sensors distributed within an ambient environment. Some arrangements enable a user to perform an object recognition process in a computationally- and time-efficient manner. Other arrangements enable users and other entities to, either individually or cooperatively, register or enroll physical objects into one or more object registries on which an object recognition process can be performed. Still other arrangements enable users and other entities to, either individually or cooperatively, associate registered or enrolled objects with one or more items of metadata. A great variety of other features and arrangements are also detailed.

Methods for object recognition and related arrangements

A system and method are described which enable planned evolution and obsolescence of multiuser wireless spectrum. One embodiment of such a system includes one or multiple centralized processors and one or multiple distributed nodes that communicate via wireline or wireless connections. The distributed nodes may share their identification number and other reconfigurable system parameters with the centralized processor. The information about all distributed nodes may be stored in a database that is shared by all centralized processors. The reconfigurable system parameters may comprise power emission, frequency band, modulation/coding scheme. The distributed nodes may be software defined radios such as FPGA, DSP, GPU and/or GPCPU that run algorithms for baseband signal processing and may be reconfigured remotely by the centralized processor. A cloud wireless system may be used wherein the distributed nodes are reconfigured periodically or instantly to adjust to the evolving wireless architecture.

System and methods for planned evolution and obsolescence of multiuser spectrum

A markerless method is described for tracking the motion of subjects in a three dimensional environment using a model based on linked kinematic chains. The invention is suitable for tracking robotic, animal or human subjects in real-time using a single computer with inexpensive video equipment, and does not require the use of markers or specialized clothing. A simple model of rigid linked segments is constructed of the subject and tracked using three dimensional volumetric data collected by a multiple camera video imaging system. A physics based method is then used to compute forces to align the model with subsequent volumetric data sets in real-time. The method is able to handle occlusion of segments and accommodates joint limits, velocity constraints, and collision constraints and provides for error recovery. The method further provides for elimination of singularities in Jacobian based calculations, which has been problematic in alternative methods.

Jason P. Luck

Papers

Real time markerless motion tracking using linked kinematic chains