Abstract

A new method in human motion analysis is presented for overcoming the problem of the shifting of skin-mounted position markers relative to the skeleton. The present version of the method is based on two-dimensional video processing and involves the recording of subjects wearing special clothing. The clothing is designed in such a way as to permit the unambiguous spatial shape recognition of each of the 17 body segments by means of an edge detection algorithm. The latter and the algorithms for the computation of segment translation and rotation constitute improved versions of previously used algorithms, especially with respect to the execution times of the respective computer program on ordinary PCs. From the recognized shapes, the translation and rotation of each segment relative to its initial configuration is computed by using positional information from the previous frames. For the first frame to be analyzed, a starting algorithm has to be applied. Finally, the configurational coordinates of the body model are calculated from the respective spatial linear and angular positions. Verf.-Referat