The Process of Motion Capture: Dealing with the Data
Bobby Bodenheimer, Charles Rose, Seth Rosenthal, and John Pella
Computer Animation and Simulation, 1997
Abstract
This paper presents a detailed description of the process of motion
capture, whereby sensor information from a performer is transformed
into an articulated, hierarchical rigid-body object. We describe the
gathering of the data, the real-time construction of a virtual
skeleton which a director can use for immediate feedback, and the
offline processing which produces the articulated object. This
offline process involves a robust statistical estimation of the size
of the skeleton and an inverse kinematic optimization to produce the
desired joint angle trajectories. Additionally, we discuss a variation
on the inverse kinematic optimization which can be used when the
standard approach does not yield satisfactory results for the special
cases when joint angle consistency is desired between a group of
motions. These procedures work well and have been used to produce
motions for a number of commercial games.
Accompanying video (DivX, 49MB, a transfer from videotape - the
image stabilizes after a few seconds).
Bobby Bodenheimer 
Last modified: Thu Oct 28 10:16:02 1999