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Real-time 3D human pose recovery from a single depth image using principal direction analysis

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Abstract

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.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the MSIP (Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning), Korea, under the ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) support program supervised by the NIPA (National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA-2013-(H0301-13-2001)). This work was also supported by the Industrial Strategic Technology Development Program (10035348, Development of a Cognitive Planning and Learning Model for Mobile Platforms) funded by the Ministry of Knowledge Economy(MKE, Korea).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Engineering, Kyung Hee University, 1 Seocheon-dong, Giheung-gu, Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do, Republic of Korea

    Dong-Luong Dinh & Sungyoung Lee

  2. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Kyung Hee University, 1 Seocheon-dong, Giheung-gu, Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do, Republic of Korea

    Myeong-Jun Lim & Tae-Seong Kim

  3. Department of Biomedical Engineering, International University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

    Nguyen Duc Thang

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  1. Dong-Luong Dinh
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  2. Myeong-Jun Lim
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  3. Nguyen Duc Thang
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  4. Sungyoung Lee
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  5. Tae-Seong Kim
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Correspondence to Sungyoung Lee or Tae-Seong Kim.

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Dinh, DL., Lim, MJ., Thang, N.D. et al. Real-time 3D human pose recovery from a single depth image using principal direction analysis. Appl Intell 41, 473–486 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-014-0535-z

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