A Novice Guide towards Human Motion Analysis and Understanding

Human motion analysis and understanding has been, and is still, the focus of attention of many disciplines which is considered an obvious indicator of the wide and massive importance of the subject. The purpose of this article is to shed some light on this very important subject, so it can be a good insight for a novice computer vision researcher in this field by providing him/her with a wealth of knowledge about the subject covering many directions. There are two main contributions of this article. The first one investigates various aspects of some disciplines (e.g., arts, philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience) that are interested in the subject and review some of their contributions stressing on those that can be useful for computer vision researchers. Moreover, many examples are illustrated to indicate the benefits of integrating concepts and results among different disciplines. The second contribution is concerned with the subject from the computer vision aspect where we discuss the following issues. First, we explore many demanding and promising applications to reveal the wide and massive importance of the field. Second, we list various types of sensors that may be used for acquiring various data. Third, we review different taxonomies used for classifying motions. Fourth, we review various processes involved in motion analysis. Fifth, we exhibit how different surveys are structured. Sixth, we examine many of the most cited and recent reviews in the field that have been published during the past two decades to reveal various approaches used for implementing different stages of the problem and refer to various algorithms and their suitability for different situations. Moreover, we provide a long list of public datasets indicating both the importance of having those datasets available to the researchers and the importance of including their ground truth data. In addition, we also discuss briefly some important examples of these datasets. Finally, we provide a general discussion of the subject from the aspect of computer vision.