Automatic Body Analysis for Mixed Reality Applications

The present paper elaborates on specific techniques to improve the performance of a technical system that was designed and implemented by the IST-art.live project to offer multimedia authors the capacity of designing immersive interactive narratives involving real people into their own universe of pictures, graphics and associated designs. The resulting mixed-reality environments allow for the creation of stories that mix graphical elements with inputs from live cameras. When some users come in front of the cameras, they get themselves immersed within the visual ambiance and they are therefore involved within the narrative, which they are able to interact with through their gestures and behavior. The present paper introduces new results about the body analysis of the users and the interactive capabilities it provides: head, hands and feet of the users are detected and tracked thanks to geodesic distances with respect to the center of gravity of the segmented silhouettes and human morphological information.