A Geometric Approach to Human Motion Modelling

We propose a geometric approach to articulated tracking, where the human pose representation is expressed on the Riemannian manifold of joint positions. This is in contrast to conventional methods where the problem is phrased in terms of intrinsic parameters of the human pose. Our model is based on a physically natural metric that also has strong links to neurological models of human motion planning. Some benefits of the model is that it allows for easy modeling of interaction with the environment, for data-driven optimization schemes and for well-posed low-pass filtering properties.

To apply the Riemannian model in practice, we derive simulation schemes for Brownian motion on manifolds as well as computationally efficient approximation schemes. The resulting algorithms seem to outperform gold standards both in terms of accuracy and running times.