Deep Inertial Poser: Learning to Reconstruct Human Pose from Sparse Inertial Measurements in Real Time

2018

Article

ps

We demonstrate a novel deep neural network capable of reconstructing human full body pose in real-time from 6 Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) worn on the user's body. In doing so, we address several difficult challenges. First, the problem is severely under-constrained as multiple pose parameters produce the same IMU orientations. Second, capturing IMU data in conjunction with ground-truth poses is expensive and difficult to do in many target application scenarios (e.g., outdoors). Third, modeling temporal dependencies through non-linear optimization has proven effective in prior work but makes real-time prediction infeasible. To address this important limitation, we learn the temporal pose priors using deep learning. To learn from sufficient data, we synthesize IMU data from motion capture datasets. A bi-directional RNN architecture leverages past and future information that is available at training time. At test time, we deploy the network in a sliding window fashion, retaining real time capabilities. To evaluate our method, we recorded DIP-IMU, a dataset consisting of 10 subjects wearing 17 IMUs for validation in 64 sequences with 330,000 time instants; this constitutes the largest IMU dataset publicly available. We quantitatively evaluate our approach on multiple datasets and show results from a real-time implementation. DIP-IMU and the code are available for research purposes.

@article{DIP:SIGGRAPHAsia:2018,
  title = {Deep Inertial Poser: Learning to Reconstruct Human Pose from Sparse Inertial Measurements in Real Time},
  author = {Huang, Yinghao and Kaufmann, Manuel and Aksan, Emre and Black, Michael J. and Hilliges, Otmar and Pons-Moll, Gerard},
  journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics, (Proc. SIGGRAPH Asia)},
  volume = {37},
  pages = {185:1-185:15},
  publisher = {ACM},
  month = nov,
  year = {2018},
  note = {Two first authors contributed equally},
  doi = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3272127.3275108},
  month_numeric = {11}
}