Sen-Cap: Sensor-Flexible and Noise-Resilient Human Motion Capture via LiDAR-Camera Integration
2026-08-03 • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
AI summaryⓘ
The authors present Sen-Cap, a system that captures 3D human motion by combining data from LiDAR and cameras. Unlike previous methods, it does not require strict sensor calibration, allowing flexible sensor setups even if their positions change. Sen-Cap also remains reliable when sensors produce noisy or incomplete data, thanks to a special tracking method. The system works in real time and performs very well on several benchmark tests. This makes Sen-Cap useful for real-world applications like sports analysis and robotics.
3D human motion captureLiDARcamerasensor calibrationmulti-modal datapose estimationnoise resiliencetrajectory trackingreal-time processingbenchmark datasets
Authors
Aoru Xue, Yujing Sun, Yiming Ren, Kwok-Yan Lam, Mao Ye, Yuexin Ma
Abstract
We propose Sen-Cap, a Sensor-Flexible and Noise-Resilient 3D human motion Capture framework that integrates multi-modal data from LiDAR and camera. While multi-modal sensors provide richer information than single-modal sensors, existing approaches still suffer from two core challenges. First, multi-modal alignment/matching across arbitrarily deployed sensors is typically handled by explicit calibration, which propagates errors under changing viewpoints and in turn constrains deployment to fixed, highly overlapped layouts. Second, prior methods degrade under severe noise or partial sensor failures, which are common in real-world environments. To address these challenges, Sen-Cap introduces a Unified Across-Sensor Motion Estimator that reconstructs local pose and shape in a human-centric space without calibrations between sensors, supporting a flexible number of sensors, as well as a Noise-Resistant Trajectory Tracker that maintains robustness under severe point cloud noise through iterative refinement. These sensor-flexible and noise-resilient features make Sen-Cap more practical in real-world deployment. Notably, operating in real time, Sen-Cap achieves state-of-the-art performance on major metrics on Human-M3 and FreeMotion, as well as strong cross-domain performance on LiDARHuman26M and RELI11D. This combination of flexibility and robustness opens new opportunities for motion capture in real-world scenarios, e.g. sports analytics, field robotics, and large-scale immersive environments.