This is the first book which informs about recent progress in biomechanics, computer vision and computer graphics – all in one volume. Researchers from these areas have contributed to this book to promote the establishment of human motion research as a multi-facetted discipline and to improve the exchange of ideas and concepts between these three areas. The book combines carefully written reviews with detailed reports on recent progress in research.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second Workshop on Human Motion, HumanMotion 2007, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil October 2007 in conjunction with ICCV 2007. The 22 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 38 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on motion capture and pose estimation, body and limb tracking and segmentation and activity recognition.

Motion capture is a technique for recording a performance and then translating it into mathematical terms. Animating motion is critical for the development of applications such as animation, virtual environments and video games. Character animation is the process by which natural movements are modelled and digitized so that digital character movements appear as natural as possible. There are three approaches to character animation: keyframe animation, motion capture, and simulation.

The Handbook of Human Motion is a large cross-disciplinary reference work which covers the many interlinked facets of the science and technology of human motion and its measurement. Individual chapters cover fundamental principles and technological developments, the state-of-the-art and consider applications across four broad and interconnected fields; medicine, sport, forensics and animation. The huge strides in technological advancement made over the past century make it possible to measure motion with unprecedented precision, but also lead to new challenges. This work introduces the many different approaches and systems used in motion capture, including IR and ultrasound, mechanical systems and video, plus some emerging techniques. The large variety of techniques used for the study of motion science in medicine can make analysis a complicated process, but extremely effective for the treatment of the patient when well utilised. The handbook descri bes how motion capture techniques are applied in medicine, and shows how the resulting analysis can help in diagnosis and treatment. A closely related field, sports science involves a combination of in-depth medical knowledge and detailed understanding of performance and training techniques, and motion capture can play an extremely important role in linking these disciplines. The handbook considers which technologies are most appropriate in specific circumstances, how they are applied and how this can help prevent injury and improve sporting performance. The application of motion capture in forensic science and security is reviewed, with chapters dedicated to specific areas including employment law, injury analysis, criminal activity and motion/facial recognition. And in the final area of application, the book describes how novel motion capture techniques have been designed specifically to aid the creation of increasingly realistic animation within films and v ideo games, with Lord of the Rings and Avatar just two examples. Chapters will provide an overview of the bespoke motion capture techniques developed for animation, how these have influenced advances in film and game design, and the links to behavioural studies, both in humans and in robotics. Comprising a cross-referenced compendium of different techniques and applications across a broad field, the Handbook of Human Motion provides the reader with a detailed reference and simultaneously a source of inspiration for future work. The book will be of use to students, researchers, engineers and others working in any field relevant to human motion capture.

Cameras for 3D depth imaging, using either time-of-flight (ToF) or structured light sensors, have received a lot of attention recently and have been improved considerably over the last few years. The present techniques make full-range 3D data available at video frame rates, and thus pave the way for a much broader application of 3D vision systems. A series of workshops have closely followed the developments within ToF imaging over the years. Today, depth imaging workshops can be found at every major computer vision conference. The papers presented in this volume stem from a seminar on Time-of-Flight Imaging held at Schloss Dagstuhl in October 2012. They cover all aspects of ToF depth imaging, from sensors and basic foundations, to algorithms for low level processing, to important applications that exploit depth imaging. In addition, this book contains the proceedings of a workshop on Imaging New Modalities, which was held at the German Conference on Pattern Recognition in Saarbrücken, Germany, in September 2013. A state-of-the-art report on the Kinect sensor and its applications is followed by two reports on local and global ToF motion compensation and a novel depth capture system using a plenoptic multi-lens multi-focus camera sensor.

Computational Studies of Human Motion: Part 1, Tracking and Motion Synthesis reviews methods for kinematic tracking of the human body in video. The review confines itself to the earlier stages of motion, focusing on tracking and motion synthesis. There is an extensive discussion of open issues. The authors identify some puzzling phenomena associated with the choice of human motion representation --- joint angles vs. joint positions. The review concludes with a quick guide to resources and an extensive bibliography of over 400 references. Computational Studies of Human Motion: Part 1, Tracking and Motion Synthesis is an invaluable reference for those engaged in computational geometry, computer graphics, image processing, imaging in general, and robotic.

The area of simulated human figures is an active research area in computer graphics, and Norman Badler's group at the University of Pennsylvania is one of the leaders in the field. This book summarizes the state of the art in simulating human figures, discusses many of the interesting application areas, and makes some assumptions and predictions about where the field is going.