Capturing and analyzing stability of human body motions using video cameras

The need for capturing human body motions has been increasing recently for making movies, sports instruction systems and robots that can simulate human motions. The paper proposes a method to facilitate motion capturing using inexpensive video cameras. In our system, a few cameras are used to obtain multiple views of a human body and a three dimensional (3D) volume consistent with the views is created. A model of the human body is then fitted to the volume to obtain the configuration of the human body. We also propose a method to analyze the stability of human postures. We have analyzed a technique of the traditional Chinese martial art, Shorinji Kempo, based on stability to show the effectiveness of our method.