3-D tracking and motion estimation using hierarchical Kaiman filter

The authors present.a novel approach to the problem of tracking and reconstructing articulated objects in 3-D space. The newly conceived computational process and its supporting data structure, the hierarchical Kaiman filter (HKF) and the adaptive hierarchical structure (AHS), allow the problem to be treated in a single, unified framework. There are three novelties in the authors formulation: reducing the 3-D tracking problem to 2-D tracking; incorporating the kinematic and the dynamic properties of object; and tracking nonrigid objects. To demonstrate the appropriateness of the proposed method, the authors present some of the experimental results on both synthetic and real images.