Group Inertial Poser: Multi-Person Pose and Global Translation from Sparse Inertial Sensors and Ultra-Wideband Ranging

Abstract

Tracking human full-body motion using sparse wearable inertial measurement units (IMUs) overcomes the limitations of occlusion and instrumentation of the environment inherent in vision-based approaches. However, purely IMU-based tracking compromises translation estimates and accurate relative positioning between individual people, as inertial cues are inherently self-referential and provide no direct spatial reference about others. In this paper, we present a novel approach for robustly estimating body poses and global translation for multiple individuals by leveraging the distances between sparse wearable sensors - both on each individual and across different people. Our method Group Inertial Poser estimates these absolute distances between pairs of sensors from ultra-wideband ranging (UWB) and fuses them with inertial observations as input into structured state-space models to integrate temporal motion patterns for precise 3D pose estimation. Our novel two-step optimization further leverages the estimated distances for accurately tracking people's global trajectories through the world. We also introduce GIP-DB, the first IMU+UWB dataset for two-person tracking, which comprises 200 minutes of motion recordings from 14 participants. In our evaluation, Group Inertial Poser outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in accuracy and robustness across synthetic and real-world captures, showing the promise of IMU+UWB-based multi-human motion capture in the wild.