Gaussian Processes for Monocular 3D People tracking

We advocate the use of Gaussian Processes (GPs) to learn prior models of human pose and motion for 3D people tracking. The Gaussian Process Latent variable model (GPLVM) provides a low-dimensional embedding of the human pose, and defines a density function that gives higher probability to poses close to the training data. The Gaussian Process Dynamical Model (GPDM) provides also a complex dynamical model in terms of another GP. With the use of Bayesian model averaging both GPLVM and GPDM can be learned from relatively small amounts of training data, and they generalize gracefully to motions outside the training set. We show that such priors are effective for tracking a range of human walking styles, despite weak and noisy image measurements and a very simple image likelihood. Tracking is formulated in terms of a MAP estimator on short sequences of poses within a sliding temporal window.