<title>Pfinder: real-time tracking of the human body</title>

Pfinder is a real-time system for tracking and interpretation of people. It runs on a standard SGI Indy computer, and has performed reliably on thousands of people in many different physical locations. The system uses a multiclass statistical model of color and shape to segment a person from a background scene, and implements heuristics which can find and track people's head and hands in a wide range of viewing conditions. Pfinder produces a real- time representation of a user useful for applications such as wireless interfaces, video databases, and low-bandwidth coding, without cumbersome wires or attached sensors.