Low cost motion tracking system based on structured light illumination

Advanced motion tracking systems have been generally applied to movie production and digital entertainment. Due to the successful of Nintendo´s Wii game machines, low cost motion tracking solutions are of particularly great demand in the computer gaming industry. In this paper, a low cost optical based motion capture system is proposed. The proposed system makes use of 2 high frame rate DLP projectors which project specially designed IR light patterns to the target object with IR sensing device attached. The pattern of illumination as recorded by the IR sensing device is converted to digital data words and sent via a wireless channel back to the central computing unit for estimating the 3D coordinates of the target object. The system has the advantage of low cost with competitive performance in the update rate of the system.