Recovering 3D human pose based on biomechanical constraints, postures comfort and image shading

•We introduce a set of biomechanical constraints to reduce the number of postures.•We verify that in 341 images the correct posture is ranked in the first 10 positions.•The result was that for 92% of the images, the model ranked the correct answer.

This paper presents a new model to identify 3D human poses in pictures, given a single input image. The proposed approach is based on a well known model found in the literature, including improvements in terms of biomechanical restrictions aiming to reduce the number of 3D possible postures that correctly represent the pose in the 2D image. Since the generated set of poses can have more than one possible posture, we propose a ranking system in order to suggest the best generated postures according to a “comfort” criterion and shading characteristics in the image as well. The comfort criterion adopts assumptions in terms of pose equilibrium, while the shading criterion eliminates the ambiguities of postures taken into account the image illumination. We must emphasize that the removal of ambiguous 3D poses related to a single image is the main focus of this work. The achieved results were analyzed w.r.t. visual inspection of users as well as a state of the art technique and indicate that our model contributed in some way to the solution of that challenge problem.