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Abstract

We present a novel fully-automatic approach for estimating an articulated
skeleton of a moving subject and its motion from body marker trajectories that
have been measured with an optical motion capture system. Our method does not
require a priori information about the shape and proportions of the tracked
subject, can be applied to arbitrary motion sequences, and renders dedicated
initialization poses unnecessary. To serve this purpose, our algorithm first
identifies individual rigid bodies by means of a variant of spectral
clustering. Thereafter, it determines joint positions at each time step of
motion through numerical optimization, reconstructs the skeleton topology, and
finally enforces fixed bone length constraints. Through experiments, we
demonstrate the robustness and effciency of our algorithm and show that it
outperforms related methods from the literature in terms of accuracy and speed.