Is the MS Kinect suitable for motion analysis?

Abstract

Investigating human motion with expensive and accurate optical marker based systems has been the state of the art since long ago. However, markerless low-cost systems have always been a desideratum in the field of biomechanics and sports science. Due to increasing computer chip power and the corresponding progress in image processing techniques the realization of such a system has become feasible. With the advent of the Microsoft Kinect sensor in 2011 a flexible low-cost tool has entered the computer game market that enables markerless tracking of human motion. At first sight the Kinect provides an amazing accuracy. The goal of the present work is to quantitatively investigate the tracking accuracy of the Kinect sensor by studying the human gait cycle on a treadmill. The Kinect results are compared with data stemming from a VICON system which is regarded as a kind of gold standard in terms of spatial resolution. Subsequently, a post processing step is applied to the Kinect data using anthropometric data as a priori information in order to enhance Kinect’s tracking results.