A simple-structured real-time motion capture system employing silhouette images

This paper describes a novel system for real time human motion capture. A motion capture system is a sensors-and-computers system that recovers and produces three-dimensional (3-D) models of a person in motion. Commercially available motion capture systems are all large-scale systems based on complicated recovery architecture and algorithms. This makes motion capture techniques unpopular among those researchers/users who need 3-D human motion recovery for their familiar subjects. In this paper, a novel motion capture system having a simple structure is proposed based on back projection of silhouette images with some computational devices to accelerate procedures. In the performed experiment, the proposed motion capture system containing a LAN, a host computer and four pairs of a camera and a computer successfully achieved real-time 3-D human motion recovery.