Tracking humans and other deformable objects

2003-2007: Ph.D -- Incremental Discovery of Object Parts in Video Sequences
This work addresses the problem of automatically discovering the rigid parts of an initially unknown moving deformable object in a monocular video sequence. The parts are first extracted through motion-based segmentation, using a time scale automatically chosen with the quantity of motion concept. Tracking and reobservation reinforce these low-level segmentation results and further segmentation is performed only when and where no modeled parts can be tracked.

2002: Intermission -- Low-level tracking
Models for low-level tracking are basic image primitives (i.e. blobs) while models for high-level tracking are coherent, structured sets of specific primitives. Complex models are gradually generated from basic models. For instance, the blob corresponding to the subject is detected, then the possibility of segmenting this blob into body parts is tested. If the test result is positive, segmentation is performed and may further continue inside the body parts (i.e. identifying the fingers of a hand, eyes in a face, etc.), thus refining the model as much as possible. Low-level tracking video (MPEG).

2001-2002: Masters -- Simultaneous Tracking and Estimation of a Skeletal Model for Monitoring Human Motion
This work presents a vision system for tracking a 3D articulated human model from the observation of isolated features from multiple viewpoints. A generic model is instantiated by estimating invariant elements (limb lengths) during tracking. The model is used as feedback both in the estimation module for filtering and in the segmentation module where it predicts the feature's position and size.

Publications:
Stéphane Drouin, Patrick Hébert and Marc Parizeau. Incremental Discovery of Object Parts in Video Sequences. To appear in Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 2007.

Stéphane Drouin, Patrick Hébert and Marc Parizeau. Incremental Motion-Based Discovery of Object Parts in Video Sequences. In 16th Annual Canadian Conference on Intelligent Systems (IS-2006), Victoria, B.C., May 31 - June 2 2006. (IS2006 poster)

Stéphane Drouin, Patrick Hébert and Marc Parizeau. Incremental discovery of object parts in video sequences. In IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2005), Beijing, China, October 15-21, 2005. (ICCV poster, PDF)

Stéphane Drouin, Patrick Hébert and Marc Parizeau. Simultaneous Tracking and Estimation of a Skeletal Model for Monitoring Human Motion. In 16th International Conference on Vision Interface, pp. 81-88, June 11-13 2003. (PDF)

Stéphane Drouin, Régis Poulin, Patrick Hébert and Marc Parizeau. Monitoring Human Activities: Flexible Calibration of a Wide Area System of Synchronized Cameras. In 16th International Conference on Vision Interface, pp. 49-56, June 11-13 2003. (PDF)