3D Human Reconstruction in the Wild with Collaborative Aerial Cameras
Abstract
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
BibTeX
@conference{Ho-2021-128969,author = {Cherie Ho and Andrew Jong and Harry Freeman and Rohan Rao and Rogerio Bonatti and Sebastian Scherer},
title = {3D Human Reconstruction in the Wild with Collaborative Aerial Cameras},
booktitle = {Proceedings of (IROS) IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems},
year = {2021},
month = {September},
}