Glimpse.3D: A Motion-Triggered Stereo Body Camera for 3D Experience Capture and Preview

The Glimpse.3D is a body-worn camera that captures, processes, stores, and transmits 3D visual information of a real-world environment using a low-cost camera-based sensor system that is constrained by its limited processing capability, storage, and battery life. The 3D content is viewed on a mobile device such as a smartphone or a virtual reality headset. This system can be used in applications such as capturing and sharing 3D content in the social media, training people in different professions, and post-facto analysis of an event. Glimpse.3D uses off-the-shelf hardware and standard computer vision algorithms. Its novelty lies in the ability to optimally control camera data acquisition and processing stages to guarantee the desired quality of captured information and battery life. The design of the controller is based on extensive measurements and modeling of the relationships between the linear and angular motion of a body-worn camera and the quality of generated 3D point clouds as well as the battery life of the system. To achieve this, we 1) devise a new metric to quantify the quality of generated 3D point clouds, 2) formulate an optimization problem to find an optimal trigger point for the camera system that prolongs its battery life while maximizing the quality of captured 3D environment, and 3) make the model adaptive so that the system evolves and its performance improves over time.