Flexible registration of human motion data with parameterized motion models

This paper presents an efficient model-based approach for automatic human motion registration, which builds temporal correspondences between structurally similar but distinctive motion examples. The key idea of the model-based registration process is to construct a parameterized motion model from a set of preregistered motion examples. With such a model, we can register an input motion with the parameterized motion model by continuously deforming the model to best match the input motion. We formulate the registration process in a gradient-based nonlinear optimization framework by minimizing an objective function that measures differences between the input motion and deforming motion. We also develop a multi-resolution optimization process to efficiently estimate the model parameters as well as the temporal correspondences between the input motion and deforming motion. We demonstrate the performance of our approach by testing the algorithm on difficult motion sequences and comparing with alternative approaches.