DeMoCap: Low-Cost Marker-Based Motion Capture

Optical marker-based motion capture (MoCap) remains the predominant way to acquire high-fidelity articulated body motions. We introduce DeMoCap, the first data-driven approach for end-to-end marker-based MoCap, using only a sparse setup of spatio-temporally aligned, consumer-grade infrared-depth cameras. Trading off some of their typical features, our approach is the sole robust option for far lower-cost marker-based MoCap than high-end solutions. We introduce an end-to-end differentiable markers-to-pose model to solve a set of challenges such as under-constrained position estimates, noisy input data and spatial configuration invariance. We simultaneously handle depth and marker detection noise, label and localize the markers, and estimate the 3D pose by introducing a novel spatial 3D coordinate regression technique under a multi-view rendering and supervision concept. DeMoCap is driven by a special dataset captured with 4 spatio-temporally aligned low-cost Intel RealSense D415 sensors and a 24 MXT40S camera professional MoCap system, used as input and ground truth, respectively.