Development of an Open Source Software for Real Time Optical Motion Capture

This paper discusses the development and release of an open source real time motion capture system for character animation, the OpenMoCap. The software carries out the entire pipeline for acquisition of motion data and its output in appropriate formats to modeling and animation software. OpenMoCap uses the passive optical capture technique to follow markers positions in a scene across the time, and its development is based on digital image analysis techniques. The defined architecture is designed for real time motion recording and is flexible and modular. It allows the addition of new optimized modules for specific functions, as an interface to virtual and augmented reality headsets, different cameras sets and markerless motion capture, taking advantage of the existing ones. In order to obtain quantitative results to assess the software and the created motion capture workflow, OpenMoCap was compared with a commercial optical motion capture system. The performance of the three most used trackers was also evaluated with OpenMoCap The present version of the software is available to download at GitHub. In this paper, the architecture, construction modules and performance comparison are discussed with the scope to present the software as a choice to input motion data to virtual and augmented reality applications.