Patent ID: 7778446

Claim:
A method for determining a mapping function for body pose estimation, the method comprising: using a computer processor to perform steps of: receiving a two-dimensional training image sequence of a moving subject, and a corresponding sequence of three-dimensional body pose representations of the moving subject; determining a set of appearance patches and motion patches for each of the two-dimensional training images in the training image sequence, the appearance patches representing an appearance of the moving subject in the training image sequence, and the motion patches representing movement of the subject between image frames of the training image sequence; extracting features from the appearance patches and the motion patches; and applying a multidimensional boosting regression to the appearance patches and the motion patches to derive the mapping function, the mapping function mapping each set of appearance and motion patches of the two-dimensional training images to a three-dimensional body pose representation of the subject, wherein the multidimensional boosting regression is based at least in part on the extracted features, and wherein applying the multidimensional boosting regression comprises: initializing the mapping function to an initial value; computing pseudo-residuals representing a difference between pose representations of the subject and a result of the mapping function applied to the training image sequence; determining an optimal feature from a set of features and an optimal threshold value based on the computed pseudo-residuals; determining parameters of a learner function using the optimal feature and threshold; and combining the learner function with the mapping function to update the mapping function.