A block-based model for monitoring of human activity

The study of human activity is applicable to a large number of science and technology fields, such as surveillance, biomechanics or sports applications. This article presents BB6-HM, a block-based human model for real-time monitoring of a large number of visual events and states related to human activity analysis, which can be used as components of a library to describe more complex activities in such important areas as surveillance, for example, luggage at airports, clients’ behaviour in banks and patients in hospitals. BB6-HM is inspired by the proportionality rules commonly used in Visual Arts, i.e., for dividing the human silhouette into six rectangles of the same height. The major advantage of this proposal is that analysis of the human can be easily broken down into regions, so that we can obtain information of activities. The computational load is very low, so it is possible to define a very fast implementation. Finally, this model has been applied to build classifiers for the detection of primitive events and visual attributes using heuristic rules and machine learning techniques.