Outside-in monocular IR camera based HMD pose estimation via geometric optimization

Accurately tracking a Head Mounted Display (HMD) with a 6 degree of freedom is essential to achieve a comfortable and a nausea free experience in Virtual Reality. Existing commercial HMD systems using synchronized Infrared (IR) camera and blinking IR-LEDs can achieve highly accurate tracking. However, most of the o-the-shelf cameras do not support frame synchronization. In this paper, we propose a novel method for real time HMD pose estimation without using any camera synchronization or LED blinking. We extended over the state of the art pose estimation algorithm by introducing geometrically constrained optimization. In addition, we propose a novel system to increase robustness to the blurred IR-LEDs paerns appearing at high-velocity movements. The quantitative evaluations showed signicant improvements in pose stability and accuracy over wide rotational movements as well as a decrease in runtime.