Automatic Calibration of a Six-Degrees-of-Freedom Pose Estimation System

TL;DR

This paper presents an automatic calibration algorithm for a cost-effective six-degrees-of-freedom human pose estimation system using infrared transmitters, improving accuracy and ease of setup over manual calibration methods.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel automatic calibration method for infrared transmitter devices in human pose systems, eliminating manual measurement errors and enhancing setup flexibility.

Findings

Calibration achieves higher accuracy than manual methods

System remains precise regardless of calibration movement speed

Works effectively across various environments

Abstract

Systems for estimating the six-degrees-of-freedom human body pose have been improving for over two decades. Technologies such as motion capture cameras, advanced gaming peripherals and more recently both deep learning techniques and virtual reality systems have shown impressive results. However, most systems that provide high accuracy and high precision are expensive and not easy to operate. Recently, research has been carried out to estimate the human body pose using the HTC Vive virtual reality system. This system shows accurate results while keeping the cost under a 1000 USD. This system uses an optical approach. Two transmitter devices emit infrared pulses and laser planes are tracked by use of photo diodes on receiver hardware. A system using these transmitter devices combined with low-cost custom-made receiver hardware was developed previously but requires manual measurement of the position and orientation of the transmitter devices. These manual measurements can be time consuming, prone to error and not possible in particular setups. We propose an algorithm to automatically calibrate the poses of the transmitter devices in any chosen environment with custom receiver/calibration hardware. Results show that the calibration works in a variety of setups while being more accurate than what manual measurements would allow. Furthermore, the calibration movement and speed has no noticeable influence on the precision of the results.