3D Human Reconstruction in the Wild with Collaborative Aerial Cameras

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time multi-drone system for 3D human motion capture in outdoor environments, overcoming occlusion and noise challenges without markers, and validated through simulations and real-world tests.

Contribution

It presents a novel multi-robot coordination scheme for aerial cameras that enables markerless 3D human reconstruction in natural, obstacle-rich environments.

Findings

System achieves accurate 3D reconstruction in outdoor settings.

Multi-robot coordination maintains optimal camera formation.

Validated with real drones performing dynamic human activities.

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