ITR: Monitoring Human Activities

This project investigates two problems associated with the monitoring of human activities: The first problem is tracking of articulated motion as a whole without identifying individual limb motion. The goal is to address certain shortcomings in previous solutions to this problem, the main shortcoming being their over-constrained nature. The proposed solution, which is presented as a real-time human tracking

system, will be capable of working under many difficult circumstances. The second problem is recognition of

articulated motion. The goal here is to show that the recovery of three-dimensional properties of the object or even two-dimensional tracking of the object parts are not necessary steps that must precede action recognition. The proposed approach uses motion features only. Unlike other similar approaches, the motion

features will be used in such a way to represent complex and long actions as well as to distinguish different actions with many similarities. Each action is represented as a manifold in the lower dimension space and matching is done by comparing these manifolds. As part of a homeland security scenario, its is planned to use these methods to monitor outdoor human activities based on the ability to recognize, for example, that a human runs in the opposite direction that a crowd moves.