Robust and Automatic Optical Motion Tracking

Marker-based optical motion tracking is an established technique to capture and reconstruct the skeleton and motion of a subject. However, several practical problems still arise, mostly due to ambiguities caused by occluded or wrongly identified markers which often makes post-processing by a human user inevitable. We present techniques to make marker-based optical motion tracking an automatic and robust process. The aim of our framework is a self-calibrating system, which automatically identifies rigid cliques of markers and recovers the skeleton topology and geometry of a tracked subject without any auxiliary information about the tracking setup. The gathered information is used to make the actual motion recording phase robust to marker occlusions by reconstructing missing limbs or joints of the subject using inverse kinematic methods. The resulting techniques provide a simple, general framework to perform optical motion tracking which minimizes the need for complex and manual post-processing.