3D Human Pose Estimation with Muscles

Kevin Zhu (University of Waterloo) · AliAsghar MohammadiNasrabadi (University of Waterloo) · Alexander Wong (University of Waterloo) · John McPhee (University of Waterloo)
3d human pose estimatoranthropometricsbiofidelitybiomechanics studiesdynamics equationsexternal physics enginejoint torqueskinetics estimationlagrange’s equationsmonocular videomultihypothesis approachmuscle torque generatorsmuscle-dynamics modelingmuscleposephysics pose estimatorsregression-based approach

We introduce MusclePose as an end-to-end learnable physics-infused 3D human pose estimator that incorporates muscle-dynamics modeling to infer human dynamics from monocular video. Current physics pose estimators aim to predict physically plausible poses by enforcing the underlying dynamics equations that govern motion. Since this is an underconstrained problem without force-annotated data, methods often estimate kinetics with external physics optimizers that may not be compatible with existing learning frameworks, or are too slow for real-time inference. While more recent methods use a regression-based approach to overcome these issues, the estimated kinetics can be seen as auxiliary predictions, and may not be physically plausible. To this end, we build on existing regression-based approaches, and aim to improve the biofidelity of kinetic inference with a multihypothesis approach