EgoCap: Egocentric Marker-less Motion Capture with Two Fisheye Cameras
This addresses the need for more comfortable and flexible motion capture for applications like virtual reality, though it is an incremental improvement over existing marker-less methods.
The paper tackles the problem of capturing full-body motion without markers or restrictive suits by proposing a real-time, egocentric method using a stereo pair of fisheye cameras attached to a helmet or VR headset, enabling motion capture in general indoor and outdoor scenes with the user freely moving around.
Marker-based and marker-less optical skeletal motion-capture methods use an outside-in arrangement of cameras placed around a scene, with viewpoints converging on the center. They often create discomfort by possibly needed marker suits, and their recording volume is severely restricted and often constrained to indoor scenes with controlled backgrounds. Alternative suit-based systems use several inertial measurement units or an exoskeleton to capture motion. This makes capturing independent of a confined volume, but requires substantial, often constraining, and hard to set up body instrumentation. We therefore propose a new method for real-time, marker-less and egocentric motion capture which estimates the full-body skeleton pose from a lightweight stereo pair of fisheye cameras that are attached to a helmet or virtual reality headset. It combines the strength of a new generative pose estimation framework for fisheye views with a ConvNet-based body-part detector trained on a large new dataset. Our inside-in method captures full-body motion in general indoor and outdoor scenes, and also crowded scenes with many people in close vicinity. The captured user can freely move around, which enables reconstruction of larger-scale activities and is particularly useful in virtual reality to freely roam and interact, while seeing the fully motion-captured virtual body.