Pfinder: real-time tracking of the human body

Abstract

Pfinder is a real-time system for tracking and interpretation of people. It runs on a standard SGI Indy computer, and has performed reliably on thousands of people in many different physical locations. The system uses a multi-class statistical model of color and shape to obtain a 2-D representation of head and hands in a wide range of viewing conditions. These representations are useful for applications such as wireless interfaces, video databases, and low-bandwidth coding, without cumbersome wires or attached sensors.