RPGD: RANSAC-P3P Gradient Descent for Extrinsic Calibration in 3D Human Pose Estimation

TL;DR

RPGD is a robust, automatic extrinsic calibration method for 3D human pose estimation that combines RANSAC-P3P with gradient descent, achieving high accuracy using natural human motion.

Contribution

The paper introduces RPGD, a novel coarse-to-fine calibration framework that effectively aligns skeletal data with camera views using only natural human motion.

Findings

Achieves sub-pixel MPJPE reprojection error in noisy conditions

Consistently recovers accurate extrinsic parameters across datasets

Provides a practical automatic calibration solution for large-scale 3D HPE

Abstract

In this paper, we propose RPGD (RANSAC-P3P Gradient Descent), a human-pose-driven extrinsic calibration framework that robustly aligns MoCap-based 3D skeletal data with monocular or multi-view RGB cameras using only natural human motion. RPGD formulates extrinsic calibration as a coarse-to-fine problem tailored to human poses, combining the global robustness of RANSAC-P3P with Gradient-Descent-based refinement. We evaluate RPGD on three large-scale public 3D HPE datasets as well as on a self-collected in-the-wild dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that RPGD consistently recovers extrinsic parameters with accuracy comparable to the provided ground truth, achieving sub-pixel MPJPE reprojection error even in challenging, noisy settings. These results indicate that RPGD provides a practical and automatic solution for reliable extrinsic calibration of large-scale 3D HPE dataset collection.