Abstract
This paper presents a general analysis framework towards exploiting the underlying hierarchical and scalable structure of an articulated object for pose estimation and tracking. The Scalable Human Body Model (SHBM) is presented as a set of human body models ordered following a hierarchy criteria. The concept of annealing is applied to derive a generic particle filtering scheme able to perform a sequential filtering over the models contained in the SHBM leading to a structural annealing process. This scheme is applied to perform human motion capture in a multi-camera environment. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed system is addressed by comparing its performance with the standard and annealed particle filtering approaches over an annotated database.
