Tobias Schubert
MAKE IT ReaL - Motion capture tracking of humans and animals
The aim in this project is the development of an online motion capture tracking system, which is able to track complicated human and animal motions in a robust way. More precisely we glue indistinguishable markers on arbitrary positions of the skin of the mammal and measure their positions in motion. The main task are to initialize the method, to associate the resulting data positions to the right markers and find the underlying skeleton structure.
While many existing approaches can deal with the latter two problems, they typically need a specific pose for initialization. As this is rather unpractical in the context of animal tracking this often requires a manual initialization process. We developed an approach to reliably track animals and humans in marker-based optical motion capture systems with freely attached markers that is also able to perform an automatic initialization without any pre- or post-processing of the data.Many existing skeleton tracking approaches use a predefined skeleton structure, which is globally scaled to the persons or animals height. Detailed skeleton parameter studies only exists for some kind of animals and additionally there is a lot of variation in the skeleton bone parameter relations between different mammal breeds. We developed an approach for an automatic bone parameter estimation during tracking.
Link to project page: MAKE IT ReaL