Pfinder: Real-time tracking of the human body

Abstract

Pfinder is a real-time system for tracking people and interpreting thier behavior. It runs at 10Hz 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. Pfinder has been successfully used in a wide range of applications including wireless interfaces, video databases, and low-bandwidth coding. 1 Introduction Applications such as video databases, wireless virtual reality interfaces, smart rooms, very-low-bandwidth video compression, and security monitoring all have in common the need to track and interpret human behavior. The ability to find and follow people's head, hands, and body is therefore an important visual problem. To address this need we have developed a real-time system called Pfinder ("person finder") that substantially solves the problem for arbitrarily c...