MagShield: Towards Better Robustness in Sparse Inertial Motion Capture Under Magnetic Disturbances

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel method, named MagShield, designed to address the issue of magnetic disturbances in sparse inertial motion capture (MoCap) systems. Existing Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) are prone to orientation estimation errors in magnetically disturbed environments, limiting the practical application of inertial Mocap systems in real-world scenarios. To address this problem, MagShield employs a "detect-then-correct" strategy, first detecting magnetic disturbances through multi-IMU joint analysis, and then correcting orientation errors using human motion priors. MagShield can be ntegrated with most existing sparse inertial MoCap systems, improving their performance in magnetically disturbed environments. Experimental results demonstrate that MagShield significantly enhances the accuracy of motion capture under magnetic interference and exhibits good compatibility across different sparse inertial MoCap systems. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/YZ-Shiao/MagShield.