Gait analysis is necessary to diagnose movement disorders. In order to reduce the costs of three-dimensional motion capture systems, new low-cost methods of motion analysis have been developed. The ...purpose of this study was to evaluate the inter- and intra-rater reliability of Kinovea
and the agreement with a three-dimensional motion system for detecting the joint angles of the hip, knee and ankle during the initial contact phase of walking. Fifty healthy subjects participated in this study. All participants were examined twice with a one-week interval between the two appointments. The motion data were recorded using the VICON Motion System
and digital video cameras. The intra-rater reliability showed a good correlation for the hip, the knee and the ankle joints (Intraclass Correlation Coefficient, ICC > 0.85) for both observers. The ICC for the inter-rater reliability was >0.90 for the hip, the knee and the ankle joints. The Bland-Altman plots showed that the magnitude of disagreement was approximately ±5° for intra-rater reliability, ±2.5° for inter-rater reliability and around ±2.5° to ±5° for Kinovea
versus Vicon
. The ICC was good for the hip, knee and ankle angles registered with Kinovea
during the initial contact of walking for both observers (intra-rater reliability) and higher for the agreement between observers (inter-rater reliability). However, the Bland-Altman plots showed disagreement between observers, measurements and systems (Kinovea
vs. three-dimensional motion system) that should be considered in the interpretation of clinical evaluations.
Markerless motion capture and understanding of professional non-daily human movements is an important yet unsolved task, which suffers from complex motion patterns and severe self-occlusion, ...especially for the monocular setting. In this paper, we propose SportsCap—the first approach for simultaneously capturing 3D human motions and understanding fine-grained actions from monocular challenging sports video input. Our approach utilizes the semantic and temporally structured sub-motion prior in the embedding space for motion capture and understanding in a data-driven multi-task manner. To enable robust capture under complex motion patterns, we propose an effective motion embedding module to recover both the implicit motion embedding and explicit 3D motion details via a corresponding mapping function as well as a sub-motion classifier. Based on such hybrid motion information, we introduce a multi-stream spatial-temporal graph convolutional network to predict the fine-grained semantic action attributes, and adopt a semantic attribute mapping block to assemble various correlated action attributes into a high-level action label for the overall detailed understanding of the whole sequence, so as to enable various applications like action assessment or motion scoring. Comprehensive experiments on both public and our proposed datasets show that with a challenging monocular sports video input, our novel approach not only significantly improves the accuracy of 3D human motion capture, but also recovers accurate fine-grained semantic action attribute.
We present a modular differentiable renderer design that yields performance superior to previous methods by leveraging existing, highly optimized hardware graphics pipelines. Our design supports all ...crucial operations in a modern graphics pipeline: rasterizing large numbers of triangles, attribute interpolation, filtered texture lookups, as well as user-programmable shading and geometry processing, all in high resolutions. Our modular primitives allow custom, high-performance graphics pipelines to be built directly within automatic differentiation frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow. As a motivating application, we formulate facial performance capture as an inverse rendering problem and show that it can be solved efficiently using our tools. Our results indicate that this simple and straightforward approach achieves excellent geometric correspondence between rendered results and reference imagery.
This study sought to compare and validate baseball pitching mechanics, including joint angles and spatiotemporal parameters, from a single camera markerless motion capture solution with a 3D optical ...marker-based system. Ten healthy pitchers threw 2-3 maximum effort fastballs while concurrently using marker-based optical capture and pitchAI
TM
(markerless) motion capture. Time-series measures were compared using R-squared (r
2
), and root mean square error (RMSE). Discrete kinematic measures at foot plant, maximal shoulder external rotation, and ball release, plus four spatiotemporal parameters were evaluated using descriptive statistics, Bland-Altman analyses, Pearson's correlation coefficients, p-values, r
2
, and RMSE. For time-series angles, r
2
ranged from 0.69 (glove arm shoulder external rotation) to 0.98 (trunk and pelvis rotation), and RMSE ranged from 4.37° (trunk lateral tilt) to 20.78° (glove arm shoulder external rotation). Bias for individual joint angle and spatiotemporal parameters ranged from −11.31 (glove arm shoulder horizontal abduction; MER) to 12.01 (ball visible). RMSE was 3.62 m/s for arm speed, 5.75% height for stride length and 21.75 ms for the ball visible metric. pitchAI
TM
can be recommended as a markerless alternative to marker-based motion capture for quantifying pitching kinematics. A database of pitchAI
TM
ranges should be established for comparison between systems.
Marker-based motion capture (mocap) is a conventional method used in biomechanics research to precisely analyze human movement. However, the time-consuming marker placement process and extensive ...post-processing limit its wider adoption. Therefore, markerless mocap systems that use deep learning to estimate 2D keypoint from images have emerged as a promising alternative, but annotation errors in training datasets used by deep learning models can affect estimation accuracy. To improve the precision of 2D keypoint annotation, we present a method that uses anatomical landmarks based on marker-based mocap. Specifically, we use multiple RGB cameras synchronized and calibrated with a marker-based mocap system to create a high-quality dataset (RRIS40) of images annotated with surface anatomical landmarks. A deep neural network is then trained to estimate these 2D anatomical landmarks and a ray-distance-based triangulation is used to calculate the 3D marker positions. We conducted extensive evaluations on our RRIS40 test set, which consists of 10 subjects performing various movements. Compared against a marker-based system, our method achieves a mean Euclidean error of 13.23 mm in 3D marker position, which is comparable to the precision of marker placement itself. By learning directly to predict anatomical keypoints from images, our method outperforms OpenCap's augmentation of 3D anatomical landmarks from triangulated wild keypoints. This highlights the potential of facilitating wider integration of markerless mocap into biomechanics research. The RRIS40 test set is made publicly available for research purposes at koonyook.github.io/rris40 .
We present a real-time approach for multi-person 3D motion capture at over 30 fps using a single RGB camera. It operates successfully in generic scenes which may contain occlusions by objects and by ...other people. Our method operates in subsequent stages. The first stage is a convolutional neural network (CNN) that estimates 2D and 3D pose features along with identity assignments for all visible joints of all individuals. We contribute a new architecture for this CNN, called SelecSLS Net, that uses novel selective long and short range skip connections to improve the information flow allowing for a drastically faster network without compromising accuracy. In the second stage, a fullyconnected neural network turns the possibly partial (on account of occlusion) 2D pose and 3D pose features for each subject into a complete 3D pose estimate per individual. The third stage applies space-time skeletal model fitting to the predicted 2D and 3D pose per subject to further reconcile the 2D and 3D pose, and enforce temporal coherence. Our method returns the full skeletal pose in joint angles for each subject. This is a further key distinction from previous work that do not produce joint angle results of a coherent skeleton in real time for multi-person scenes. The proposed system runs on consumer hardware at a previously unseen speed of more than 30 fps given 512x320 images as input while achieving state-of-the-art accuracy, which we will demonstrate on a range of challenging real-world scenes.
Methods: Neuromusculoskeletal modelling was used to estimate gluteus maximus, medius, and minimus muscle forces in 14 female footballers during 8 hip-focused exercises (single-leg squat, split squat, ...single-leg Romanian deadlift (RDL), single-leg hip thrust, banded side-step, hip hike, body weight side plank, and side-lying leg raise) performed with a 12 repetition maximum (12RM) resistance. Body weight side planks most effectively target both gluteus medius and minimus and require no equipment, making it ideal for on-field or at-home injury prevention/rehabilitation. Characterising muscle forces as well as fibre and activation properties may help inform exercise selection to optimize mechanical loading of muscles, specific to the performance, injury prevention, or rehabilitation training goals.
Due to recent advances in virtual reality (VR) technology, the development of immersive VR applications that track body motions and visualize a full-body avatar is attracting increasing research ...interest. This paper reviews related research to gather and to critically analyze recent improvements regarding the potential of full-body motion reconstruction in VR applications. We conducted a systematic literature search, matching VR and full-body tracking related keywords on IEEE Xplore, PubMed, ACM, and Scopus. Fifty-three publications were included and assigned in three groups: studies using markerless and marker-based motion tracking systems as well as systems using inertial measurement units. All analyzed research publications track the motions of the user wearing a head-mounted display and visualize a full-body avatar. The analysis confirmed that a full-body avatar can enhance the sense of embodiment and can improve the immersion within the VR. The results indicated that the Kinect device is still the most frequently used sensor (27 out of 53). Furthermore, there is a trend to track the movements of multiple users simultaneously. Many studies that enable multiplayer mode in VR use marker-based systems (7 out of 17) because they are much more robust and can accurately track full-body movements of multiple users in real-time.
The EuRoC micro aerial vehicle datasets Burri, Michael; Nikolic, Janosch; Gohl, Pascal ...
The International journal of robotics research,
09/2016, Volume:
35, Issue:
10
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This paper presents visual-inertial datasets collected on-board a micro aerial vehicle. The datasets contain synchronized stereo images, IMU measurements and accurate ground truth. The first batch of ...datasets facilitates the design and evaluation of visual-inertial localization algorithms on real flight data. It was collected in an industrial environment and contains millimeter accurate position ground truth from a laser tracking system. The second batch of datasets is aimed at precise 3D environment reconstruction and was recorded in a room equipped with a motion capture system. The datasets contain 6D pose ground truth and a detailed 3D scan of the environment. Eleven datasets are provided in total, ranging from slow flights under good visual conditions to dynamic flights with motion blur and poor illumination, enabling researchers to thoroughly test and evaluate their algorithms. All datasets contain raw sensor measurements, spatio-temporally aligned sensor data and ground truth, extrinsic and intrinsic calibrations and datasets for custom calibrations.