Automatic Estimation of Skeletal Motion from Optical Motion Capture Data

Utilization of motion capture, techniques is becoming more popular in the pipeline of articulated character animation. Based upon captured motion data, defining accurate joint positions and joint orientations for the movement of a hierarchical human-like character without using a pre-defined skeleton is still a potential concern for motion capture studios. In this paper, we present a method for automatically estimating and determining the topology of hierarchical human skeleton from optical motion capture data based on the human biomechanical information. Through the use of a novel per-frame based recursive method with joint angle minimization, human skeleton mapping from optical marker and joint angle rotations are achieved in real time. The output of motion data from a hierarchical skeleton can be applied for further character motion editing and retargeting.