Dealing with self-occlusion in region based motion capture by means of internal regions

Abstract: Self-occlusion is a common problem in silhouette based motion capture, which often results in ambiguous pose configurations. In most works this is compensated by a priori knowledge about the motion or the scene, or by the use of multiple cameras. Here we suggest to overcome this problem by splitting the surface model of the object and tracking the silhouette of each part rather than the whole object. The splitting can be done automatically by comparing the appearance of the different parts with the Jensen-Shannon divergence. Tracking is then achieved by maximizing the appearance differences of all involved parts and the background simultaneously via gradient descent. We demonstrate the improvements with tracking results from simulated and real world scenes.