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Moving beyond green screens, expensive, bulky and effort-heavy volumetric setups

Volumetric Capture is a multi-sensor (volumetric) capturing system that is:

Built to use low-cost commodity hardware
Quick to setup by offering automatic and scalable sensor connectivity
Easy to deploy due to a markerless and facile volumetric calibration
Documented across its multiple aspects, deployment, setup, hardware, etc.

Summary

The toolset is designed as a distributed system where a number of processing units each manage and collect data from a single sensor using a headless application, an Eye (see Remote Eyes). A set of sensors is orchestrated by a centralized UI application, VolCap (see Volumetric Capture), that is also the delivery point of the connected sensor streams. Communication is handled by a broker, typically co-hosted with the controlling application, although not necessary.

More specifically, its technical offerings are:

Efficient, scalable and low-resource multi-stream live sensor data acquisition and recording (see Data Acquisition)
Integration (and mixing) of Kinect 4 Azure and Intel RealSense 2.0 D415 devices (see Hardware Setup and Configuration)
Combined hardware (device-specific) and software (IEEE 1588 PTP) multi-stream synchronization (see Synchronization)
Data-driven and global optimized volumetric alignment (see Calibration)

For instructions on how to install it please see Software Setup.

Intro

Usage

It has been used in various research and development activities:

Live tele-presence in Augmented VR or Mixed/Augmented Reality settings
Performance Capture
Free Viewpoint Video (FVV)
Immersive Applications (i.e. events and/or gaming)
Motion Capture

Showcase

If you successfully deploy and use this system in your activities, we would love to hear from you, please reach out:

via GitHub issue, or
through this form, or,
via directly contacting the team,

so we can add you to our showcase.

Citation

If you use this system in academic work please consider citing:

@inproceedings{sterzentsenko2018low,
  title={A low-cost, flexible and portable volumetric capturing system},
  author={Sterzentsenko, Vladimiros and Karakottas, Antonis and Papachristou, Alexandros and Zioulis, Nikolaos and Doumanoglou, Alexandros and Zarpalas, Dimitrios and Daras, Petros},
  booktitle={2018 14th International Conference on Signal-Image Technology \& Internet-Based Systems (SITIS)},
  pages={200--207},
  year={2018},
  organization={IEEE}
}

Team

Technical Lead: Nikolaos Zioulis *
Design & Architecture: Nikolaos Zioulis , Alexandros Doumanoglou
Core: Nikolaos Zioulis , Vladimiros Sterzentsenko , Antonis Karakottas , Alexandros Doumanoglou
Contributors: Anargyros Chatzitofis , Leonidas Saroglou
Hardware: Antonis Karakottas
Team Leading & Supervision: Dimitris Zarpalas * , Petros Daras

*: Contact points

Disclaimers

Caveats

We currently only ship binaries for the Windows platform, supporting Windows 10.

There are no guarantees for the system’s functionalities and operational status.

The software is being developed to support research workflows which are continuously evoling, therefore, backwards compatibility will often break.

Maintenance & Support

The development of this system was made possible through H2020 research and development activities. A result of this project-based funding is that maintaining and providing continuous support is not possible after the project’s lifetime. However, while there are no commitments or obligations, the developement team will try to provide support at its own discretion and free time.