Mocap Everyone Everywhere: Lightweight Motion Capture With Smartwatches and a Head-Mounted Camera

Jiye Lee, Hanbyul Joo; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 1091-1100

We present a lightweight and affordable motion capture method based on two smartwatches and a head-mounted camera. In contrast to the existing approaches that use six or more expert-level IMU devices our approach is much more cost-effective and convenient. Our method can make wearable motion capture accessible to everyone everywhere enabling 3D full-body motion capture in diverse environments. As a key idea to overcome the extreme sparsity and ambiguities of sensor inputs with different modalities we integrate 6D head poses obtained from the head-mounted cameras for motion estimation. To enable capture in expansive indoor and outdoor scenes we propose an algorithm to track and update floor level changes to define head poses coupled with a multi-stage Transformer-based regression module. We also introduce novel strategies leveraging visual cues of egocentric images to further enhance the motion capture quality while reducing ambiguities. We demonstrate the performance of our method on various challenging scenarios including complex outdoor environments and everyday motions including object interactions and social interactions among multiple individuals.