In this paper, we present a non-intrusive method for human motion estimation from a monocular video camera for the teleoperation of ROBONAUT (ROBOtic astroNAUT). ROBONAUT is an anthropomorphic robot developed at NASA - JSC, which is capable of dextrous, human- like maneuvers to handle common extravehicular activity tools. The human operator is represented using an articulated three-dimensional model consisting of rigid links connected by spherical joints. The shape of a link is described by a triangular mesh and its motion by six parameters: one three-dimensional translation vector and three rotation angles. The motion parameters of the links are estimated by maximizing the conditional probability of the frame-to-frame intensity differences at observation points. The algorithm was applied to real test sequences of a moving arm with very encouraging results. Specifically, the mean error for the derived wrist position (using the estimated motion parameters) was 0.57
G. Martinez, Ioannis A. Kakadiaris, Darby Magruder