Physics-based Person Tracking Using the Anthropomorphic Walker

Contribution:
Evaluation:
Reproducibility:
Improvements:

Contribution : Physics based Model for tracking people,as an alternative to other methods, for instance kinematic models, is suggested. Instead of modeling full body dynamics, a biomechanics based lower body tracking model is implemented.

Evaluation: The model was evaluated for 4 different types of walking and environmental variations. Three of these were generated specifically to test the model performance in changes in speed, simulated occlusion and turning. The model then was applied to an external dataset (HumanEva).

Reproducibility: The components of the model have been explained considerably well, though lots of the have been referred to previous work and weren't revisited. THe parameters of most of these components appeared to have been set manually or empirically while evaluation. So, there might stay some room for ambiguity while reproducing the results completely.

Improvements: Overall the paper was well written and explained. Model parameter selection could have been emphasized more.

-- Main.sumanm - 01 Dec 2011

Contribution: A new method for tracking is proposed, where the underlying model is not kinematic but rather physics-based. The method function without learning and is real time, but focuses mainly on walking, and the tracking is based on monocular video sequences.

Evaluation: I think this part was actually very good. The showed a very good visualization of their results vs reality by an overlaid image, and the carried out a variety of experiments (various speeds, etc) to show robustness. Some numerical values would have been perfection, but those are in general difficult to obtain.

Improvements: performance would probably be boosted by using more than one point of view. As it is, it seems they can only track movements that lie perfectly on a plane perpendicular to the direction of the camera, which while a good first step, is far from optimal.

Reproducibility: I think this is the part where the paper is most laking. While explicit formulas and algorithms are given and spelled out, parameters are not specified, nor are the conditions of the recording and so on. This paper is fairly complex and hard to describe with perfect accuracy, however, so the authors had to compromise between length and precision.

-- Main.ginestra - 01 Dec 2011

-- MichielVanDePanne - 27 Nov 2011