M3: Marker-free Model Reconstruction and Motion Tracking from 3D Voxel Data

used technique to acquire motion parameters. The acquisition process
typically requires an intrusion into the scene in the form of optical markers
which are used to estimate the parameters of motion as well as the kinematic
structure of the performer. Marker-free optical motion capture approaches
exist, but due to their dependence on a specific type of a-priori model they
can hardly be used to track other subjects, e.g. animals. To bridge the gap
between the generality of marker-based methods and the applicability of
marker-free methods we present a flexible non-intrusive approach that
estimates both, a kinematic model and its parameters of motion from a
sequence of voxel-volumes. The volume sequences are reconstructed from
multi-view video data by means of a shape-from-silhouette technique. The
described method is well-suited for but not limited to motion capture of
human subjects.