On the human pose recovery based on a single view

Estimating the pose of the observed person is crucial for a large variety of applications including home entertainment, man-machine interaction, video surveillance, etc. Often, only a single side view is available, but authors claim that it is possible to derive the pose despite that humans evolve in a 3D environment. In addition, to decrease the sensitivity to color and texture, it is preferable to rely only on the silhouette to recover the pose. Under these conditions, we show that there is an intrinsic limitation: at least two poses correspond to the observed silhouette. We discuss this intrinsic limitation in details in this short paper. To our knowledge, this issue has been overlooked by authors in the past. We observe that this limitation has an impact on the way previous reported results should be interpreted, and it has clearly to be taken into account for designing new methods.