Papers for

motion capture studios

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Egorayformer improves 3d human pose estimation from head cameras

EgoRayFormer: Ray-Space Stereo Refinement for Egocentric 3D Human Pose Estimation

Abstract: Head-mounted stereo fisheye cameras provide a compact view of the wearer's body, but strong distortion, partial visibility and a short baseline make 3D pose estimation difficult. Existing refinement decoders sample image features independently in each view, without requiring the samples to correspond to a common 3D hypothesis. We introduce EgoRayFormer, a causal pose estimator that couples stereo feature sampling and geometric refinement in ray space. For each joint, the decoder projects shared 3D hypotheses along and around its viewing ray into both images. A geometric branch then corrects the projected joint locations and intersects the resulting rays; a learned gate blends this geometric estimate with a learned pose update. This formulation introduces an explicit stereo constraint while retaining flexibility when the rays provide weak depth constraints. In local evaluations on the official device-relative test splits, EgoRayFormer achieves three-seed mean MPJPEs of 17.64 mm on UnrealEgo2 and 49.55 mm on UnrealEgo-RW, improving to 47.57 mm with UnrealEgo2 pre-training. In paired validation ablations, removing the geometric branch increases MPJPE in all three seeds at both input resolutions. With a common ResNet-18 encoder and input resolution, our system reduces RW test MPJPE by 9.09 mm relative to the device-relative EgoPoseFormer baseline. A separate protocol analysis quantifies the difference between device-relative and oracle-root evaluation.

Mon 19 OctRobotics
The gist
Estimating 3D positions of body joints from cameras worn on the head is hard because these cameras see only part of the body with distorted and wide-angle views. The authors propose EgoRayFormer, a method that shares 3D guesses of each joint's location between both camera views and refines these guesses using geometry and learning. This approach better uses the relationship between the two camera images, helping improve the accuracy of 3D pose estimates. Tests show EgoRayFormer outperforms previous methods on standard benchmarks for egocentric body tracking.
Open → 2610.26641v1

DirtyMoCap creates robust full-body motion capture from noisy markers

DirtyMoCap: Robust Motion Capture from Unconstrained Markers

Abstract: Optical motion capture delivers high-fidelity human motion, but its reliance on strict marker layouts and clean trajectories severely limits its real-world applicability. In practice, tracking systems frequently output unconstrained markers: sparse, noisy, and unordered point clouds with unknown or varying configurations. To bridge the gap between corrupted raw markers and parametric human models, we introduce DirtyMoCap, a robust, marker-layout-free framework. Our core insight is to map unordered marker observations to a fixed set of "proxy anchors" comprising skeletal joints and body surface points, which serve as a stable intermediate representation. We first initialize and track these anchors over long sequences using a recurrent sliding-window architecture. Then, a custom differentiable Gauss-Newton solver fits the SMPL-H model to the tracked anchors to recover full-body pose, translation, and shape. By explicitly deriving geometric residuals, our solver learns adaptive observation confidence, smoothness, and prior weights end-to-end, adapting dynamically to the reliability of the input data. Extensive experiments on diverse, noisy marker configurations demonstrate that DirtyMoCap successfully generalizes across arbitrary layouts using only a single trained model. It consistently outperforms state-of-the-art configuration-specific baselines in both joint and vertex reconstruction accuracy, while our custom CUDA solver achieves up to a 100x speedup over standard PyTorch implementations. We further apply DirtyMoCap to heterogeneous raw optical MoCap recordings of traditional Chinese martial arts, yielding a Kung Fu motion dataset of temporally coherent SMPL-H reconstructions. Code and data are available at https://wanglongzju.github.io/DirtyMoCap-Project-Page.

Thu 17 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Motion capture systems that track human movements usually need markers placed precisely and cleanly, which is hard to do outside labs. The authors present DirtyMoCap, a system that can take messy, unordered, and noisy marker data and still figure out the body’s pose and shape accurately. They do this by translating the raw marker data into stable 'anchors' corresponding to body joints and surfaces, then fitting a detailed human model to these anchors using a fast and adaptable solver. Their approach works well on many different marker setups and outperforms existing methods, even speeding up computations significantly. They also demonstrate the system by capturing martial arts motions, creating a new dataset of realistic movement recordings.
Open → 2609.19927v1