The visual analysis of human movement: A survey

The ability to recognize humans and their activities by vision is key for a machine to interact intelligently and effortlessly with a human-inhabited environment. Because of many potentially important applications, "looking at people" is currently one of the most active application domains in computer vision. This survey identifies a number of promising applications and provides an overview of recent developments in this domain. The scope of this survey is limited to work on whole-body or hand motion; it does not include work on human faces. The emphasis is on discussing the various methodologies; they are grouped in 2-D approaches with or without explicit shape models and 3-D approaches. Where appropriate, systems are reviewed. We conclude with some thoughts about future directions. (C) 1999 Academic Press.