Markerless Body Motion Capturing for 3D Character Animation based on Multi-view Cameras

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel application system for the generation of three-dimensional (3D) character animation driven by markerless human body motion capturing. The entire pipeline of the system consists of five stages: 1) the capturing of motion data using multiple cameras, 2) detection of the two-dimensional (2D) human body joints, 3) estimation of the 3D joints, 4) calculation of bone transformation matrices, and 5) generation of character animation. The main objective of this study is to generate a 3D skeleton and animation for 3D characters using multi-view images captured by ordinary cameras. The computational complexity of the 3D skeleton reconstruction based on 3D vision has been reduced as needed to achieve frame-by-frame motion capturing. The experimental results reveal that our system can effectively and efficiently capture human actions and use them to animate 3D cartoon characters in real-time.