Human Motion Capture Using a Drone
This enables motion capture for applications like sports or film without markers or fixed cameras, though it is incremental as it adapts existing reconstruction methods to a new platform.
The authors tackled the problem of motion capture in unconstrained environments by developing a drone-based system with an on-board RGB camera, achieving usable accuracy in various indoor and outdoor settings as demonstrated on a new DroCap dataset.
Current motion capture (MoCap) systems generally require markers and multiple calibrated cameras, which can be used only in constrained environments. In this work we introduce a drone-based system for 3D human MoCap. The system only needs an autonomously flying drone with an on-board RGB camera and is usable in various indoor and outdoor environments. A reconstruction algorithm is developed to recover full-body motion from the video recorded by the drone. We argue that, besides the capability of tracking a moving subject, a flying drone also provides fast varying viewpoints, which is beneficial for motion reconstruction. We evaluate the accuracy of the proposed system using our new DroCap dataset and also demonstrate its applicability for MoCap in the wild using a consumer drone.