ml-lab / drocap

Human Motion Capture Using a Drone

This page introduces the following paper:

Human Motion Capture Using a Drone. X. Zhou, S. Liu, G. Pavlakos, V.J. Kumar, K. Daniilidis. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2018.

Abstract

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.

Video

Here is the video introducing this work: https://youtu.be/A8H0zwN4Xp0

Dataset

The DroCap dataset introduced in the paper can be downloaded from: http://visiondata.cis.upenn.edu/monocap/data.zip