Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of Optical Low-Cost Motion Capture System

This paper describes the design, implementation and evaluation of a low-cost motion capture system with support of interfaces for practically any types of cameras. We present the system’s software architecture design, development of software to implement and integrate several existing algorithms, and effective approaches to address practical issues such as object calibration and synchronizing the real-world and virtual-world coordinate frames. The motion capture system is developed to work with active markers and all the processing is done by the software on a mid-level workstation. With the Firefly MV cameras used, the developed system is capable of working at 60 frames per second, having the ability to simultaneously track the positions and orientations of five objects, with latency averaging about 15 ms, and with an average measurement error of about 0.65 mm between the distance of each pair of four LEDs mounted on a target that is placed 1.5–3.5 m from the cameras.