Fast and Robust Landmark Tracking in X-ray Locomotion Sequences Containing Severe Occlusions

Abstract

Recent advances in the understanding of animal locomotion have proven it to be a key element of many fields in biology, motion science, and robotics. For the analysis of walking animals, high-speed x-ray videography is employed. For a biological evaluation of these x-ray sequences, anatomical landmarks have to be located in each frame. However, due to the motion of the animals, severe occlusions complicate this task and standard tracking methods can not be applied. We present a robust tracking approach which is based on the idea of dividing a template into sub-templates to overcome occlusions. The difference to other sub-template approaches is that we allow soft decisions for the fusion of the single hypotheses, which greatly benefits tracking stability. Also, we show how anatomical knowledge can be included into the tracking process to further improve the performance. Experiments on real datasets show that our method achieves results superior to those of existing robust approaches.