A new illuminated contour-based marker system for optical motion capture

Motion capture has been developed with the aim to track and/or reproduce complex movements. This paper will mainly focus on the optical marker based approach to tracking and will present a new type of marker identified as an illuminated contour-based marker. This new marker has been developed in order to solve the problems identified with current standard sphere-type markers, such as the need to wait through a whole "flash sequence" in order to automatically identify individual markers, ambiguities related to current color cues and problems associated with missing information in data streams. Experiments indicate that the new markers support active marker extraction and robust tracking across time steps.