Abstract:

We envision a convenient telepresence system available to users anywhere, anytime. Such a system requires displays and sensors embedded in commonly worn items such as eyeglasses, wristwatches, and shoes. To that end, we present a standalone real-time system for the dynamic 3D capture of a person, relying only on cameras embedded into a head-worn device, and on Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) worn on the wrists and ankles. Our prototype system egocentrically reconstructs the wearer’s motion via learning-based pose estimation, which fuses inputs from visual and inertial sensors that complement each other, overcoming challenges such as inconsistent limb visibility in head-worn views, as well as pose ambiguity from sparse IMUs. The estimated pose is continuously re-targeted to a prescanned surface model, resulting in a high-fidelity 3D reconstruction. We demonstrate our system by reconstructing various human body movements and show that our visual-inertial learning-based method, which runs in real time, outperforms both visual-only and inertial-only approaches. We captured an egocentric visual-inertial 3D human pose dataset publicly available at https://sites.google.com/site/youngwooncha/egovip for training and evaluating similar methods.