Real-time 3D human pose recovery from a single depth image using principal direction analysis
In this paper, we present a novel approach to recover a 3D human pose in real-time from a single depth image using principal direction analysis (PDA). Human body parts are first recognized from a human depth silhouette via trained random forests (RFs). PDA is applied to each recognized body part, which is presented as a set of points in 3D, to estimate its principal direction. Finally, a 3D human pose is recovered by mapping the principal direction to each body part of a 3D synthetic human model. We perform both quantitative and qualitative evaluations of our proposed 3D human pose recovering methodology. We show that our proposed approach has a low average reconstruction error of 7.07 degrees for four key joint angles and performs more reliably on a sequence of unconstrained poses than conventional methods. In addition, our methodology runs at a speed of 20 FPS on a standard PC, indicating that our system is suitable for real-time applications. Our 3D pose recovery methodology is applicable to applications ranging from human computer interactions to human activity recognition.
3d human pose recovery depth image principal direction analysis body part recognition