US Patent 8488888 Classification of posture states

Systems and methods for estimating a posture of a body part of a user are disclosed. In one disclosed embodiment, an image is received from a sensor, where the image includes at least a portion of an image of the user including the body part. The skeleton information of the user is estimated from the image, a region of the image corresponding to the body part is identified at least partially based on the skeleton information, and a shape descriptor is extracted for the region and the shape descriptor is classified based on training data to estimate the posture of the body part.