Faster Deep Inertial Pose Estimation with Six Inertial Sensors

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 22; no. 19; p. 7144
• Main Authors: Xia, Di, Zhu, Yeqing, Zhang, Heng
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 21.09.2022; MDPI
• Subjects: Ablation; Accuracy; Algorithms; Analysis; Cameras; Datasets; Inference; Model accuracy; Motion capture; Neural networks; Occlusion; Pose estimation; Sensors; sparse inertial sensor; SRU
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s22197144

We propose a novel pose estimation method that can predict the full-body pose from six inertial sensors worn by the user. This method solves problems encountered in vision, such as occlusion or expensive deployment. We address several complex challenges. First, we use the SRU network structure instead of the bidirectional RNN structure used in previous work to reduce the computational effort of the model without losing its accuracy. Second, our model does not require joint position supervision to achieve the best results of the previous work. Finally, since sensor data tend to be noisy, we use SmoothLoss to reduce the impact of inertial sensors on pose estimation. The faster deep inertial poser model proposed in this paper can perform online inference at 90 FPS on the CPU. We reduce the impact of each error by more than 10% and increased the inference speed by 250% compared to the previous state of the art.