I've been using the Pi Camera for a while now for various other projects, and in that time I've been impressed by the level of control you have over the camera module. This makes it a very interesting option for a motion capture camera where you need to maximise certain aspects, like frame-rate and frame syncing.

The RPi3 and camera combo is definitely getting a little old now, and there are far more powerful single board computers out there today, but from a price/performance point of view very little comes close. Especially when it comes to the camera module and its capabilities.

If anyone has ideas on a camera system that has similar or better features and is just as affordable, I'd love to hear about it. But for now I'm going with the Pi.

Another interesting aspect about the Pi3 is that most of the camera related functionality is controlled through the GPU, therefore freeing up the CPU to handle something else. This is where I'm thinking that the extra processing power could be used to do marker processing.

What is marker processing? Each frame taken by a camera will contain the reflective markers worn by the actor. Marker processing takes this image data and finds the 2D co-ordinates of the markers. Of course this step doesn't need to be done in realtime on the RPi (the video footage can be processed later after capture), but this opens up an opportunity to get real-time results from the system.

Next entry I'll be going over the real world performance of the Pi and camera module.