Ambulatory real-time micro-sensor motion capture

Commercial optical human motion capture systems perform well in studio-like environments, but they do not provide solution in daily-life surroundings. Micro-sensor motion capture has shown its potentials because of its ubiquity and low cost. We present an ambulatory low-cost real-time motion capture system using wearable micro-sensors (accelerometers, magnetometers and gyroscopes), which can capture and reconstruct human motion in real-time almost everywhere. It mainly consists of three parts: a sensor subsystem, a data fusion subsystem and an animation subsystem. The sensor subsystem collects human motion signals and transfers them into the data fusion subsystem. The data fusion subsystem performs sensor fusion to obtain motion information, i.e., the orientation and position of each body segment. Using the motion information from the data fusion subsystem, the animation subsystem drives the avatar in the 3D virtual world in order to reconstruct human motion. All the processes are accomplished in real-time. The experimental results show that our system can capture motions and drive animations in real-time vividly without drift and delay. And the output from our system can be made use of in film-making, sports training and argument reality applications, etc.