In this paper, we propose a method to recover 3D human body motion from a video acquired by a single static camera. In order to estimate the complex state distribution of a human body, we adopt the particle filtering framework. We present the human body using several layers of representation and compose the whole body step by step. In this way, more effective particles are generated and ineffective particles are removed as we process each layer. In order to deal with the rotational motion, the frequency of rotation is obtained using a preprocessing operation. In the preprocessing step, the variance of the motion field at each image is computed, and the frequency of rotation is estimated. The estimated frequency is used for the state update in the algorithm. We successfully track the movement of figure skaters in TV broadcast image sequence, and recover the 3D shape and motion of the skater.