3D Human Reconstruction in the Wild with Collaborative Aerial Cameras
This addresses the challenge of dynamic 3D capture in the wild for applications such as sports and entertainment, representing an incremental improvement in aerial motion-capture systems.
The paper tackles the problem of reconstructing 3D human motions in outdoor environments using aerial cameras, presenting a real-time multi-robot coordination system that achieves reconstruction without markers, validated with two drones in activities like jogging and soccer.
Aerial vehicles are revolutionizing applications that require capturing the 3D structure of dynamic targets in the wild, such as sports, medicine, and entertainment. The core challenges in developing a motion-capture system that operates in outdoors environments are: (1) 3D inference requires multiple simultaneous viewpoints of the target, (2) occlusion caused by obstacles is frequent when tracking moving targets, and (3) the camera and vehicle state estimation is noisy. We present a real-time aerial system for multi-camera control that can reconstruct human motions in natural environments without the use of special-purpose markers. We develop a multi-robot coordination scheme that maintains the optimal flight formation for target reconstruction quality amongst obstacles. We provide studies evaluating system performance in simulation, and validate real-world performance using two drones while a target performs activities such as jogging and playing soccer. Supplementary video: https://youtu.be/jxt91vx0cns