MOVIN: Real-time Motion Capture using a Single LiDAR

TL;DR

MOVIN introduces a real-time, LiDAR-based motion capture system that accurately tracks full-body movements without wearable devices, enabling accessible and immersive virtual interactions.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel data-driven generative model using a single LiDAR sensor for real-time, global, full-body motion capture, with a new feature encoder for improved accuracy.

Findings

Achieves high-accuracy 3D pose estimation from LiDAR data.

Demonstrates real-time performance in practical scenarios.

Outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in evaluations.

Abstract

Recent advancements in technology have brought forth new forms of interactive applications, such as the social metaverse, where end users interact with each other through their virtual avatars. In such applications, precise full-body tracking is essential for an immersive experience and a sense of embodiment with the virtual avatar. However, current motion capture systems are not easily accessible to end users due to their high cost, the requirement for special skills to operate them, or the discomfort associated with wearable devices. In this paper, we present MOVIN, the data-driven generative method for real-time motion capture with global tracking, using a single LiDAR sensor. Our autoregressive conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) model learns the distribution of pose variations conditioned on the given 3D point cloud from LiDAR.As a central factor for high-accuracy motion capture, we propose a novel feature encoder to learn the correlation between the historical 3D point cloud data and global, local pose features, resulting in effective learning of the pose prior. Global pose features include root translation, rotation, and foot contacts, while local features comprise joint positions and rotations. Subsequently, a pose generator takes into account the sampled latent variable along with the features from the previous frame to generate a plausible current pose. Our framework accurately predicts the performer's 3D global information and local joint details while effectively considering temporally coherent movements across frames. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our architecture through quantitative and qualitative evaluations, comparing it against state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we implement a real-time application to showcase our method in real-world scenarios. MOVIN dataset is available at \url{https://movin3d.github.io/movin_pg2023/}.