A new approach for tracking human body movements by kinect sensor

Abstract

With the invention of the Microsoft Kinect sensor, high-resolution depth and visual sensing has become available for prevalent use in the smart home and medical rehabilitation. In this paper, we introduce an innovative approach for effective body movement tracking using Kinect Xbox 360 with a limited tracking system. A relatively scaled hand cursor mechanism is used for our system of interaction. Instead of tracking the whole body of the participant in the Kinect Depth space which produces 20 joints, we limit the tracking to only 2 joint (left and right hand) for the same action. Further, we have engaged Extended Kalman Filter to improve skeleton joint estimation which smooths the joint coordinates, placing the Z axis in a high level of calibration in order to make it work with X and Y coordinates simultaneously with a relatively high accuracy.