Recent developments in human motion analysis

Visual analysis of human motion is currently one of the most active research topics in computer vision. This strong interest is driven by a wide spectrum of promising applications in many areas such as virtual reality, smart surveillance, perceptual interface, etc. Human motion analysis concerns the detection, tracking and recognition of people, and more generally, the understanding of human behaviors, from image sequences involving humans. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of research on computer-vision-based human motion analysis. The emphasis is on three major issues involved in a general human motion analysis system, namely human detection, tracking and activity understanding. Various methods for each issue are discussed in order to examine the state of the art. Finally, some research challenges and future directions are discussed. (C) 2002 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.