Apparatus and method for high-speed marker-free motion capture

Abstract

A high-speed marker-free motion capture, which is capable of powerfully detecting a body's feature points corresponding to a body's end portions such as a head, hands, feet, trunk, arms and legs at a high speed in an illumination change or background or noises of cameras. The extracted feature points of the body can be directly tracked stably in a 3-dimensional space. The position errors of the feature points due to the change of the illumination conditions or a shadow can be automatically corrected and the feature points can be stably tracked with respect to overlapping and disappearance of the feature points. Further, when coordinates of the middle joints are estimated using 3-dimensional coordinates of the extracted feature points of the body, the present invention restores a human model by estimating the positions of the middle joints of the actor with high accuracy without using a motion database, thereby securing the stability and reality of the 3-dimensional motion data required in the motion capture.