Motion Capture as a Tool for Gait Recognition and Creation Realistic Animation of Human-like Figures

Motion capture or Mocap are terms used to describe the process of recording movement and translating that movement on to a digital model. It is used in military, entertainment, sports, and medical applications, and for validation of computer vision and robotics. In filmmaking it refers to recording actions of human actors, and using that information to animate digital character models in 2D or 3D computer animation. In motion capture sessions, movements of one or more actors are sampled many times per second, although with most techniques (recent developments from Weta use images for 2D motion capture and project into 3D), motion capture records only the movements of the actor, not his or her visual appearance. This animation data is mapped to a 3D model so that the model performs the same actions as the actor. This is comparable to the older technique of rotoscope, such as the 1978 The Lord of the Rings animated film where the visual appearance of the motion of an actor was filmed, then the film used as a guide for the frame-by-frame motion of a hand-drawn animated character. Camera movements can also be motion captured so that a virtual camera in the scene will pan, tilt, or dolly around the stage driven by a camera operator while the actor is performing, and the motion capture system can capture the camera and props as well as the actor's performance. This allows the computer-generated characters, images and sets to have the same perspective as the video images from the camera. A computer processes the data and displays the movements of the actor, providing the desired camera positions in terms of objects in the set. Retroactively obtaining camera movement data from the captured footage is known as match moving or camera tracking.