Practical motion capture in everyday surroundings

Abstract

Figure 1: Traditional motion-capture systems excel at recording motions within lab-like environments but struggle with recording outdoor activities such as skiing, biking, and driving. This limitation led us to design a wearable motion-capture system that records human activity in both indoor and outdoor environments. AbstractCommercial motion-capture systems produce excellent in-studio reconstructions, but offer no comparable solution for acquisition in everyday environments. We present a system for acquiring motions almost anywhere. This wearable system gathers ultrasonic time-of-flight and inertial measurements with a set of inexpensive miniature sensors worn on the garment. After recording, the information is combined using an Extended Kalman Filter to reconstruct joint configurations of a body. Experimental results show that even motions that are traditionally difficult to acquire are recorded with ease within their natural settings. Although our prototype does not reliably recover the global transformation, we show that the resulting motions are visually similar to the original ones, and that the combined acoustic and inertial system reduces the drift commonly observed in purely inertial systems. Our final results suggest that this system could become a versatile input device for a variety of augmented-reality applications.

The human motion database: A cognitive and parametric sampling of human motion

“…Such a system using ultra sonic time of flight and inertial motion sensors has been discussed in [15].…”

Activity Recognition Using Biomechanical Model Based Pose Estimation

“…A similar approach is described in [21] where the authors use inertial sensors and a kinematic model to monitor stroke patients rehabilitation process. The papers [17,19] describe motion capturing systems using inertial sensors with support of ultrasound and magnetic sensors for capturing the body pose.…”

Interactive Demonstration of Pointing Gestures for Virtual Trainers

“…The maximum update rate is 120 Hz in quaternion mode. These commercially-available sensors provide good results but different sensors and technologies can also be used [17] [18].…”