Decoupling Human and Camera Motion from Videos in the Wild

Abstract

We propose a method to reconstruct global human trajectories from videos in the wild. Our optimization method decouples the camera and human motion, which allows us to place people in the same world coordinate frame. Most existing methods do not model the camera motion; methods that rely on the background pixels to infer 3D human motion usually require a full scene reconstruction, which is often not possible for in-the-wild videos. However, even when existing SLAM systems cannot recover accurate scene reconstructions, the background pixel motion still provides enough signal to constrain the camera motion. We show that relative camera estimates along with data-driven human motion priors can resolve the scene scale ambiguity and recover global human trajectories. Our method robustly recovers the global 3D trajectories of people in challenging in-the-wild videos, such as PoseTrack. We quantify our improvement over existing methods on 3D human dataset Egobody. We further demonstrate that our recovered camera scale allows us to reason about motion of multiple people in a shared coordinate frame, which improves performance of downstream tracking in PoseTrack.