Shining a Light on Human Pose: On Shadows, Shading and the Estimation of Pose and Shape

Strong lighting is common in natural scenes yet is often viewed as a nuisance for object pose estimation and tracking. In human shape and pose estimation, cast shadows can be confused with foreground structure while self shadowing and shading variation on the body cause the appearance of the person to change with pose. Rather than attempt to minimize the effects of lighting and shadows, we show that strong lighting in a scene actually makes pose and shape estimation more robust. Additionally, by recovering multiple body poses we are able to automatically estimate the lighting in the scene and the albedo of the body. Our approach makes use of a detailed 3D body model, the parameters of which are directly recovered from image data. We provide a thorough exploration of human pose estimation

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICCV
• Authors: Alexandru O. Balan, Michael J. Black, Horst W. Haussecker, Leonid Sigal
• Keywords: Computer Vision, Human Pose Estimation, ICCV 2007, Multiple Body, Object Pose Estimation, Shape Estimation, Strong Lighting