Improved Skeleton Tracking by Duplex Kinects: A Practical Approach for Real-Time Applications

Recent development of per-frame motion extraction method can generate the skeleton of human motion in real-time with the help of RGB-D cameras such as Kinect. This leads to an economic device to provide human motion as input for real-time applications. As generated by a single-view image plus depth information, the extracted skeleton usually has problems of unwanted vibration, bone-length variation, self-occlusion, etc. This paper presents an approach to overcome these problems by synthesizing the skeletons generated by duplex Kinects, which capture the human motion in different views. The major technical difficulty of this synthesis comes from the inconsistency of two skeletons. Our algorithm is formulated under the constrained optimization framework by using the bone-lengths as hard constraints and the tradeoff between inconsistent joint positions as soft constraints. Schemes are developed to detect and re-position the problematic joints generated by per-frame method from duplex Kinects. As a result, we develop an easy, cheap and fast approach that can improve the skeleton of human motion at an average speed of 5 ms per frame.