Articulated Object Tracking by High-Speed Monocular RGB Camera

In recent years, tracking of articulated objects at high speed with monocular cameras has been gaining attention. This study presents a novel method for high-frame-rate articulated object tracking with a monocular camera. The method is an extended version of our previous research on high-speed monocular rigid object tracking. In this study, to realize tracking of an articulated object, we integrate dual-quaternion kinematics with our previous fast pixel-wise-posteriors (fast-PWP3D) tracking framework, and propose an auto-regressive (AR) process to encode the dynamic propagation of the estimated state vectors. We give a full three-dimensional derivation of the mathematical formulation of our method and show that our method is capable of tracking an articulated object having a large number of degrees of freedom with only a monocular camera, and is robust against dynamic environmental changes (e.g., illumination/partial occlusion). Moreover, we show an efficient implementation strategy of our method. The results of real-time experiments show that we achieved nearly 350 Hz performance when tracking a four degrees-of-freedom (4-DOF) articulated object with a monocular camera.

Automated summary

This study introduces a novel method for high-frame-rate articulated object tracking using monocular cameras. By integrating dual-quaternion kinematics with fast pixel-wise-posteriors tracking framework, the method is capable of robustly tracking articulated objects with many degrees of freedom in dynamic environments.