Development of a markerless optical motion capture system by an action sports camera for running motion

A marker-based optical motion capture system is often used to obtain the kinematics parameters of a running analysis. However, the attached marker could affect the participant's movement, and the system is costly because of the exclusive cameras. Due to its drawbacks, the present research aimed to develop an affordable markerless optical motion capture system for running motion. The proposed system used an action sports camera to acquire the running images of the participant. The images were segmented to get the silhouette of the participant. Then, a human body model was generated to provide a priori information to track participants' segment position. The subsequent procedure was image registration to estimate the pose of the participant's silhouette. The transformation parameters were estimated by particle swarm optimization. The optimization output in the form of the rotation angle of the body segment was then employed to identify right or left lower limbs. To validate the results of the optimization, a manual matching was conducted to obtain the actual rotation angle for all body segments. The correlation coefficient between the rotation angle from image registration and the actual rotation angle was then evaluated. It was found that the lowest correlation coefficient was 0.977 for the left foot. It implies that the accuracy of the developed system in the present work is acceptable. Furthermore, the results of the kinematics analysis have good agreement with the literature. Therefore, the developed system, not only yields acceptable running parameters, but also affordable since it uses an action sports camera and easy to use.