Abstract A method for articulated pose identification from the silhouette of a human body is presented in this paper. First the method employs an energy function to extract a dummy skeleton of a human body from the silhouette. Then it estimates the position of the joints by the knowledge of anthropotomy and the three rules given by the standard human skeleton model, which can help us judge whether a point on the skeleton is a joint. The experimental results show that the method is effective. It doesn’t require any additional restrictions on the motion and color of a human body. In the meantime the method is robust against the noise in the silhouette, which makes it have good performance in the complicated background.
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2006, Vol. 19 
