Patent ID: 6950550

Claim:
An object motion tracing method for tracing the three-dimensional motion of an object having an arbitrarily curved and smooth surface, based on the stereo image of the object concerned obtained in time series, composed of: an inputting step for inputting a stereographic image frame of the object concerned; a selecting step for selecting tracing points on a three-dimensional object model corresponding to the silhouette of the object concerned in the inputted image frame based on the present position of the object concerned; a sampling step for sampling points on the silhouette of the object in the image frame corresponding to respective tracing points on the three-dimensional object model; a measuring step for measuring the three-dimensional coordinates of the sampled corresponding points; and a detecting step for detecting the position/posture of the object from the three-dimensional coordinates of those respective tracing points and respective corresponding points and for detecting a detection error, wherein if the detected error is not small enough, the three-dimensional motion of aforesaid object is traced by continuously repeating each process from the selecting step through the detecting step toward each frame of the stereo image obtained in time series, or if the detected error is small enough, the three-dimensional motion of the aforesaid object is traced by continuously repeating each process from the inputting step through the detecting step toward each frame of the stereo image obtained in time series.