DART: Dense Articulated Real-Time Tracking

This paper introduces DART, a general framework for tracking articulated objects composed of rigid bodies chained together through a kinematic chain. DART can track a broad set of objects encountered in indoor environments, including furniture, tools, human bodies, human hands, and robot manipulators. To achieve the efficiency required for robust tracking, DART extends the signed distance function representation to articulated objects and takes full advantage of highly parallelized GPU algorithms for data association and pose optimization. We demonstrate the capabilities of DART on different types of objects that each have required dedicated tracking techniques in the past (human hand, robot interacting with object).