Tracking Human-like Natural Motion Using Deep Recurrent Neural Networks

Abstract: Kinect skeleton tracker is able to achieve considerable human body tracking performance in convenient and a low-cost manner. However, The tracker often captures unnatural human poses such as discontinuous and vibrated motions when self-occlusions occur. A majority of approaches tackle this problem by using multiple Kinect sensors in a workspace. Combination of the measurements from different sensors is then conducted in Kalman filter framework or optimization problem is formulated for sensor fusion. However, these methods usually require heuristics to measure reliability of measurements observed from each Kinect sensor. In this paper, we developed a method to improve Kinect skeleton using single Kinect sensor, in which supervised learning technique was employed to correct unnatural tracking motions. Specifically, deep recurrent neural networks were used for improving joint positions and velocities of Kinect skeleton, and three methods were proposed to integrate the refined positions and velocities for further enhancement. Moreover, we suggested a novel measure to evaluate naturalness of captured motions. We evaluated the proposed approach by comparison with the ground truth obtained using a commercial optical maker-based motion capture system.