Automated pose estimation in 3D point clouds applying annealing particle filters and inverse kinematics on a GPU

Current experiments with HCIs have shown a high demand for more natural interaction paradigms. Gestures are thereby considered the most important cue besides speech. In order to recognize gestures it is necessary to extract meaningful motion features from the body. Up to now mostly marker based tracking systems are used in virtual reality environments, since these were traditionally more reliable than purely image based detection methods. However, markers tend to be distracting and cumbersome. Following recent advances in processing power, it becomes possible to use a camera system in order to obtain a depth image of the test subject, match it to a pre-defined body model, and thus track the body parts over time. We will present a fullbody system based on APF which enables full body tracking utilizing point clouds recorded with a 3D sensor. Further refinement is provided by a specially adapted inverse kinematics system. A GPU based implementation speeds up processing significantly and allows near real time performance.