Estimating Contact Dynamics

Motion and interaction with the environment are fundamentally intertwined. Few people-tracking algorithms exploit such interactions, and those that do assume that surface geometry and dynamics are given. This paper concerns the converse problem, i.e., the inference of contact and environment properties from motion. For 3D human motion, with a 12-segment articulated body model, we show how one can estimate the forces acting on the body in terms of internal forces (joint torques), gravity, and the parameters of a contact model (e. g., the geometry and dynamics of a spring-based model). This is tested on motion capture data and video-based tracking data, with walking, jogging, cartwheels, and jumping.