Stereo 3D Tracking of Infants in Natural Play Conditions

Stereo 3D Tracking of Infants in Natural Play Conditions

This project was part of the SmarToyGym system at the Rehabilitation Robotics Laboratory. I designed a stereo camera system and 3D pose tracker to identify and track infant limb movements in natural play conditions with varying degrees of occlusion.

Abstract
This paper describes the design and implementation of a multiple view stereoscopic 3D vision system and a supporting infant tracker pipeline to track limb movement in natural play environments and identify potential metrics to quantify movement behavior. So far, human pose estimation and tracking with 3D cameras has been focused primarily on adults and cannot be directly extended to infants because of differences in visual features such as shapes, sizes and appearance. With rehabilitation in mind, we propose a portable, compact, markerless, low cost and high resolution 3D vision system and a tracking algorithm that exploits infant appearance attributes and depth information. This approach achieved a mean 3D tracking error of 8.21cm and a standard deviation of 8.75cm. We also identify two potential metrics for movement behavior analysis - approximate entropy and interaction events.

Details regarding the project can be found in our paper title "Stereo 3D Tracking of Infants in Natural Play Conditions" currently accepted into ICORR 2017.