Abstract: This paper introduces a novel framework for full body human motion reconstruction from 2D video data using a motion capture database as knowledge base containing information on how people move. By extracting suitable two-dimensional features from both, the input video sequence and the motion capture database, we are able to employ an efficient retrieval technique to run a data-driven optimization. Only little preprocessing is needed by our method, the reconstruction process runs close to real time. We evaluate the proposed techniques on synthetic two-dimensional input data obtained from motion capture data and on real video data.