Ego4o: Egocentric Human Motion Capture and Understanding from Multi-Modal Input

Abstract

This work focuses on tracking and understanding human motion using consumer wearable devices, such as VR/AR headsets, smart glasses, cellphones, and smartwatches. These devices provide diverse, multi-modal sensor inputs, including egocentric images, and 1-3 sparse IMU sensors in varied combinations. Motion descriptions can also accompany these signals. The diverse input modalities and their intermittent availability pose challenges for consistent motion capture and understanding. In this work, we present Ego4o (o for omni), a new framework for simultaneous human motion capture and understanding from multi-modal egocentric inputs. This method maintains performance with partial inputs while achieving better results when multiple modalities are combined. First, the IMU sensor inputs, the optional egocentric image, and text description of human motion are encoded into the latent space of a motion VQ-VAE. Next, the latent vectors are sent to the VQ-VAE decoder and optimized to track human motion. When motion descriptions are unavailable, the latent vectors can be input into a multi-modal LLM to generate human motion descriptions, which can further enhance motion capture accuracy. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in predicting accurate human motion and high-quality motion descriptions. Project page: https://jianwang-mpi.github.io/ego4o.