  Capturing and reconstructing a human actor's motion is important for
filmmaking and gaming. Currently, motion capture systems with static cameras
are used for pixel-level high-fidelity reconstructions. Such setups are costly,
require installation and calibration and, more importantly, confine the user to
a predetermined area. In this work, we present a drone-based motion capture
system that can alleviate these limitations. We present a complete system
implementation and study view planning which is critical for achieving
high-quality reconstructions. The main challenge for view planning for a
drone-based capture system is that it needs to be performed during motion
capture. To address this challenge, we introduce simple geometric primitives
and show that they can be used for view planning. Specifically, we introduce
Pixel-Per-Area (PPA) as a reconstruction quality proxy and plan views by
maximizing the PPA of the faces of a simple geometric shape representing the
actor. Through experiments in simulation, we show that PPA is highly correlated
with reconstruction quality. We also conduct real-world experiments showing
that our system can produce dynamic 3D reconstructions of good quality. We
share our code for the simulation experiments in the link:
https://github.com/Qingyuan-Jiang/view_planning_3dhuman
