Evaluation of action sport camera optical motion capture system for 3D gait analysis

Abstract The high price of motion capture systems on the market has been a hindrance for many hospitals, health agencies and rehabilitation centers to acquire them. Due to its significance in gait analysis, the ITB Biomechanics Research Team has developed affordable motion capture systems since 2008. The advent of Action Sport Cameras (ASC) provide an affordable and portable alternative to the available motion capture systems. Hence, this work investigated the relative accuracy of an ASC based motion capture system. The well-established Vicon V8 with 10 cameras system is utilized in this study to evaluate the proposed ASC Mocap system. Simultaneous gait data acquisition is necessary to ensure valid comparison. Evaluation of the ASC based system was carried out by comparing the spatio-temporal and kinematics parameters obtained with that obtained with Vicon. Based on the parameters obtained, the 4 GoPro Hero 5 cameras system developed by the ITB Biomechanics Team’s is deemed to be suitable to be used in Gait Analysis, especially the spatio-temporal parameters that closely match the Vicon results. For the kinematic parameters, the results obtained while qualitatively similar, in many cases differ in magnitudes. This problem is currently is still under investigation and will be reported in future works.