EMDB: The Electromagnetic Database of Global 3D Human Pose and Shape in
  the Wild
Manuel Kaufmann Jie Song Chen Guo Kaiyue Shen Tianjian Jiang Chengcheng Tang Juan Zarate Otmar Hilliges
We present EMDB, the Electromagnetic Database of Global 3D Human Pose and
Shape in the Wild. EMDB is a novel dataset that contains high-quality 3D SMPL
pose and shape parameters with global body and camera trajectories for
in-the-wild videos. We use body-worn, wireless electromagnetic (EM) sensors and
a hand-held iPhone to record a total of 58 minutes of motion data, distributed
over 81 indoor and outdoor sequences and 10 participants. Together with
accurate body poses and shapes, we also provide global camera poses and body
root trajectories. To construct EMDB, we propose a multi-stage optimization
procedure, which first fits SMPL to the 6-DoF EM measurements and then refines
the poses via image observations. To achieve high-quality results, we leverage
a neural implicit avatar model to reconstruct detailed human surface geometry
and appearance, which allows for improved alignment and smoothness via a dense
pixel-level objective. Our evaluations, conducted with a multi-view volumetric
capture system, indicate that EMDB has an expected accuracy of 2.3 cm
positional and 10.6 degrees angular error, surpassing the accuracy of previous
in-the-wild datasets. We evaluate existing state-of-the-art monocular RGB
methods for camera-relative and global pose estimation on EMDB. EMDB is
publicly available under https://ait.ethz.ch/emdb