Deep Inertial Pose: A deep learning approach for human pose estimation

Inertial-based Motion capture system has been attracting growing attention due to its wearability and unsconstrained use. However, accurate human joint estimation demands several complex and expertise demanding steps, which leads to expensive software such as the state-of-the-art MVN Awinda from Xsens Technologies. This work aims to study the use of Neural Networks to abstract the complex biomechanical models and analytical mathematics required for pose estimation. Thus, it presents a comparison of different Neural Network architectures and methodologies to understand how accurately these methods can estimate human pose, using both low cost(MPU9250) and high end (Mtw Awinda) Magnetic, Angular Rate, and Gravity (MARG) sensors. The most efficient method was the Hybrid LSTM-Madgwick detached, which achieved an Quaternion Angle distance error of 7.96, using Mtw Awinda data. Also, an ablation study was conducted to study the impact of data augmentation, output representation, window size, loss function and magnetometer data on the pose estimation error. This work indicates that Neural Networks can be trained to estimate human pose, with results comparable to the state-of-the-art fusion filters.