Motion Tracking

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What Does Motion Tracking Mean?

Motion tracking assists in tracking the movement of objects and transferring the sensed data to an application for further processing. Motion tracking includes capturing the motions of objects matching with its stored motion template. This has a wide range of applications such as in military, entertainment, sports, medical applications, validation of computer vision and robotics. Furthermore, it is also used in film making and in video game development. In many areas, motion tracking is often called motion capture, whereas in film making and games, motion tracking is commonly called match moving.

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Techopedia Explains Motion Tracking

Motion tracking enhances human-computer interaction and plays a vital role in computer animation of a 3-D model. It provides real-time information, and the amount of animation data produced by motion tracking within a given time is large. Motion tracking requires specific hardware and software programs to capture and process the data.

Video games often use motion tracking to animate characters in games like baseball, basketball or football. Movies use motion capture for effects. Motion tracking is also used in video tracking for locating a moving object using a camera. Video tracking can be used in surveillance applications to track anonymous user movement. For sophisticated motion tracking, specialized gear or clothing with embedded sensors has to be worn by the user. In such a case, the motion data is sensed by the sensors rather than captured from cameras.

Motion tracking is not only used to track human motions it can also be used to track vehicular movements and other objects as well.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.