Human motion tracking has become a hot issue in the fields of image processing and computer vision. It is receiving increasing attention from more and more researchers due to its wide applications in human-machine interfaces

virtual reality and smart surveillance

robot simulation

etc. In order to track human motion precisely

two methods of automatic tracking are proposed. One method is based on 2-D model. Taking region overlay as the matching criteria

the method adopts a matching procedure from coarse matching to fine matching for establishing the precise correspondence between the 2-D model and real human body motion; the other method is based on the feature of body parts and their connection. By locating the body parts according to their different shapes

the joint connecting the body parts can be located also

and then the human movement can be recovered by 2-D skeleton model. Based on the two methods

real human motion is tracked from simple walking movement to complex gymnastics. The result shows that the method can resist the affection of noise and the variation of intensity

and the position of the overlapped area can be estimated coarsely. Precise result can be acquired in the whole course of the movement of the body.