Recovering 3D human pose from monocular images

We describe a learning-based method for recovering 3D human body pose from single images and monocular image sequences. Our approach requires neither an explicit body model nor prior labeling of body parts in the image. Instead, it recovers pose by direct nonlinear regression against shape descriptor vectors extracted automatically from image silhouettes. For robustness against local silhouette segmentation errors, silhouette shape is encoded by histogram-of-shape-contexts descriptors. We evaluate several different regression methods: ridge regression, Relevance Vector Machine (RVM) regression, and Support Vector Machine (SVM) regression over both linear and kernel bases. The RVMs provide much sparser…