Patent ID: 7974443

Claim:
A method of tracking a human target, the method comprising: receiving an observed depth image of a scene from a source; body scanning the scene to identify a human target in the scene; removing non-target background information from the observed depth image; applying to the observed depth image one or more decision trees trained from a collection of known poses to find an exemplar pose that represents an observed pose of the human target; rasterizing a body model of the human target into a synthesized depth image having a rasterized pose; adjusting the rasterized pose of the body model into a model-fitting pose based, at least in part, on differences between the observed depth image and the synthesized depth image; comparing a confidence in the exemplar pose to a confidence in the model-fitting pose; selecting the exemplar pose if the confidence in the exemplar pose is higher than or equal to the confidence in the model-fitting pose; and selecting the model-fitting pose if the confidence in the model-fitting pose is higher than the confidence in the exemplar pose.