A novel approach in low-cost motion capture system using color descriptor and stereo webcam

Animated motion has become crucial in some electronic entertainment business products, such as games, animated movies, and simulations. Making such animated motion is associated with high cost and hard setup requirements. This research proposes a low-cost system for capturing motion using stereo webcam (two webcams placed side by side) and some daily house-grade tools. The system test has been specifically designed for shadow puppet theaters. The setup consists of two identical webcams placed side by side to acquire the depth of a marker by stereo camera triangulation. Image processing is needed to improve object detection and feature matching. Once images are captured from two webcams, they will be inverted and color-filtered to detect the markers and set those markers as features to be matched. Each feature is packed with a unique descriptor based on its color composition. Features in both images are then compared to get their related matches. When matched, their depth and position can be calculated and recorded as a 3D representation that is ready to be processed as motion data. The proposed system is reasonably efficient since we can get an average accuracy of 83.5% using webcams that cost around $7.69.