Estimation and recognition of motion segmentation and pose IMU-based human motion capture

Abstract

Talking about motion capture systems, we will think of a system that has a lot of white markers distributed on the suit worn on the human body, can record and simulate the motion of human or any other object in the software. However, these systems are worth a lot of money, can only operate in a wide and fixed space with many cameras attached around. Therefore, only large animation filmmakers or graphic designers are capable of purchasing this type of system. In this paper, the wireless IMU-based motion capture system is researched and developed with low cost, moderate accuracy, high speed, portable as well as easy-to-use, that is our main contribution. The full-featured hardware, the very simple operation program, and controlling software are focused and built on using the low cost components. The designed system is based on a network of small inertial measurement units (IMU) called “node” distributed on the human body. In essence, the MCU is the core of the board. It collects measured data from the sensors, perform orientation filter based on a quaternion-based Madgwick orientation filter and transfer data to host via Wi-Fi or store it in the memory for later use. After that, the node’s processed data was simulated by the program called “SHURIKEN launcher”. The nodes’ behavior also is controlled by this program. All of these activities are incorporated into the operation of the system in this project. The result of experiments on accuracy demonstrated the feasibility and advantages also a few shortcomings of the system. The advantages and limitations of the system, hardware and software architecture in more detail will be discussed.