Development of a motion capture system based on uncalibrated cameras

This paper presents a motion capture system based on uncalibrated cameras. Unlike various existent motion capture systems, the present system eliminates camera calibration process. This makes the proposed system easier in capturing images of an object than other motion capture systems that need camera calibration. The system is an online system including an automatic feature points tracking procedure. F cameras are linked to F personal computers respectively and they capture images of a person in motion. Color feature points attached on the person are tracked automatically on the obtained video images taking mutual distances into account. The F personal computers transfer the feature points´ image coordinates through a local area network to a main computer and the main computer performs 3-D recovery calculation and displays the recovered 3-D human motion. The proposed system shows satisfactory performance in the experiment carried out.