Technical Report 2008-001

On the Plausibility of Using Skin Texture as Virtual Markers in the Human Motion Analysis Context, a 2D Study

Björn Holmberg, Bo Nordin, Ewert Bengtsson, and Håkan Lanshammar

January 2008

For the first time it is shown that skin texture can be used as a means to match human limb surfaces between different image frames. The results are limited to motion in two dimensions. It is shown that images with a resolution that can be produced in today existing video camera hardware are usable. This is very encouraging for the future of clinical marker free human motion analysis applications. The next step will be to investigate if these results can be extended to three dimensions using a stereo camera setup.

The method uses histogram information as a means to match small image patches to one another. The histogram matching is performed using a Mutual Information criterion as the cost function and Simulated Annealing as the optimization algorithm.

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