Evaluation of skin and muscular deformations in a non-rigid motion analysis

During contraction and stretching, muscles change shape and size, and produce a deformation of skin tissues and a modification of the body segment shape. In human motion analysis, it is indispensable to take into account this phenomenon and thus approximating body limbs to rigid structures appears as restrictive. The present work aims at evaluating skin and muscular deformation, and at modeling body segment elastic behavior by analysing video sequences that capture a sport gesture. The soft tissue modeling is accomplished by using triangular meshes that automatically adapt to the body segment during the execution of a static muscle contraction. The adaptive triangular mesh is built on reference points whose motion is estimated by using the technique based on Gauss Laguerre Expansion. Promising results have been obtained by applying the proposed method to a video sequence, where an upper arm isometric contraction was present.