Automatic Estimation of Skeletal Motion from Optical Motion Capture Data

Utilization of motion capture techniques is becoming more popular in the pipeline of articulated character animation. Based upon captured motion data, defining accurate joints position and joints orientation for the movement of a hierarchical human-like character without using a pre-defined skeleton is still a potential concern for motion capture studio. In this paper, we present a method for automatically estimating hierarchical human skeleton from optical motion capture data. Our approach considers the marker group and the human biomechanical information to determine the topology of the character skeleton. The output of motion data from a hierarchical skeleton is able to be used for further character motion editing and retargeting.