Multi-camera systems support performance recording, sports and human-movement analysis, where selecting an informative viewpoint is important for reliable human pose estimation. We propose the Candidate-Joint Reprojection Ranking Network (CJRR-Net) for future-view selection among eight calibrated cameras in MPI-INF-3DHP. The model combines current-view pose observations, camera configuration, and candidate-specific geometric features obtained by reprojecting the estimated 3D pose and its uncertainty into each candidate view. CJRR-Net achieves a selected-view 2D mean per-joint position error (MPJPE) of 105.18 pixels, compared with 114.64 pixels for the shared-input MLP and 117.56 pixels for adapted PoseErrNet. It also achieves the lowest mean error among the listed policies in each evaluated occlusion group. A blender rollout illustrates repeated camera selection. These findings support candidate-specific geometry for single-view selection in the evaluated fixed eight-camera setting.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13700
Current solutions for assessing the risk of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury typically rely on expensive motion-capture labs that require substantial resource investment or subjective evaluations of specific athletic stress tests by experts. The Drop Vertical Jump (DVJ) and the Single Leg Hop (SLH) are two examples of such tests typically used to track progress in ACL rehabilitation. In this paper, we develop an unsupervised learning model that runs entirely on a smartphone for two tasks, based on an autoencoder architecture with multiple layers of graph convolutional networks, which utilizes pose estimation data to determine a person's injury risk status. Our model accurately predicts athletes at high risk of injury for both athletic stress tests, with average sensitivities and specificities of 78% and 78% for the DVJ, and 75% and 74% for the SLH. Our findings support the development of a widely accessible smartphone solution for real-time screening of ACL injury risk.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09724
Event cameras offer high temporal resolution and dynamic range for uncooperative spacecraft pose estimation, but models trained on synthetic event streams must generalize to the noise, background activity, and contrast variation of physical sensors. We present a comparative systems study of two independently developed approaches to synthetic-to-real, event-based 6-DoF spacecraft pose estimation. The first is a modular pipeline that combines learned keypoint detection and unlabeled target-domain adaptation with geometry-based pose recovery and temporal smoothing. The second directly regresses translation and rotation from global and cropped event representations using an apparent-scale cue, physics-motivated synthetic corruptions, and feature-consistency regularization. We evaluate both systems under the same SPARK 2026 hidden-test protocol on the real-event split of SPADES, with predictions for all test frames. The results reveal a component-wise reversal concealed by the aggregate challenge score: direct regression reduces orientation error by 22.7% (1.1767 to 0.9101 rad) and obtains a 13.4% lower composite score, whereas the modular pipeline reduces relative translation error by 78.7% (0.1335 to 0.0285). Archived configurations and a qualitative failure case identify plausible explanations for these complementary error profiles, without isolating their causes. These findings motivate a testable hybrid design that combines direct orientation estimation with geometry-constrained translation recovery.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09717
Inertial odometry is a compelling approach to state estimation for agile quadrotor flight due to its affordability, low weight, and robustness to perceptual degradation. However, relying only on integrated inertial measurements is impractical, as sensor errors and time-varying biases lead to significant pose drift. Although recent advances have enabled inertial odometry for drone racing, existing approaches show limited generalization to trajectories not seen during training. This work improves generalization by adopting a body-frame representation and incorporating body-frame torque dynamics into the learning pipeline. The learned model predicts short-horizon relative displacements, which are fused with IMU measurements in an Extended Kalman Filter. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art learned inertial odometry approach for quadrotor pose estimation on unseen trajectories. An additional evaluation on four public quadrotor datasets, with whole trajectory shapes held out of training, confirms a lower velocity error on every held-out set and shows that the torque input is most informative when it is derived from the rotor signals. Code, data pipeline and trained models are publicly available.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09584
In this paper, we present a 3D human pose estimator that predicts metrically accurate human joint positions in the camera coordinate frame. This task requires recovering the configuration of the body joints, scale, and metric camera-local placement. In monocular images, body size and camera distance are coupled through perspective projection and therefore cannot be determined uniquely from image alone. This ambiguity can be reduced by combining three complementary sources of information: learned RGB priors, direct depth measurements, and geometric constraints (e.g., ground contact) from the environment. We extend a pretrained full-body estimator with optional metric depth and geometry-processing modules that improve camera-distance estimation and depth-guided body refinement while preserving RGB-only operation. The resulting unified model supports RGB, RGB-Ground, and RGB-D using shared learned parameters. Unlike pelvis-relative error, camera-local error also measures placement relative to the camera. Compared with the existing foundation model SAM 3D Body, our methods with RGB, RGB-Ground, and RGB-D modes reduce camera-local joint-position error by 12.16%, 31.00% and 54.61% respectively.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08954
Assistive robots and search-and-rescue platforms require reliable human state sensing in smoke, darkness, and privacy-sensitive environments, where cameras and LiDAR may be unreliable Millimeter-wave radar offers an alternative that works without ambient light, penetrates smoke, and does not capture visual appearance. However, the compact arrays that fit robot size, power, and cost budgets have limited apertures, producing joint-localization errors on the order of decimeters at a few meters, large enough to compromise the safety margins and tracking accuracy a robot depends on. Existing pipelines reduce pose error through frame fusion, multiple viewpoints, return selection, or stronger estimators, but examine one technique at a time, without relating its effect to a shared measurement limit or separating gains from added information from gains from estimator completion. We address this gap with a framework that models the human and environment as one time-varying scattering field and states a Cramer-Rao type error floor for joint localization as a function of bandwidth, aperture, signal-to-noise ratio, fused frame count, phase coherence, and visibility of retained returns. We then use existing frame fusion, multi viewpoint, return selection, and pose estimation methods as matched probes of this floor rather than as competing pipelines. Under the evaluated conditions, experiments on three datasets and a live deployment show these strategies move joint localization error in the predicted directions, for example lowering mean per-joint position error from about 97 to 65 mm with a second viewpoint, while a stronger estimator mainly lowers overall error by completing joints the measurement cannot resolve. These results give the robotics community a principled basis for deciding whether to prioritize observation design or estimator capacity when deploying reliable mmWave human sensing.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08863
Modern video models possess strong visual priors, yet do not natively represent human action in metric 3D space. We present EgoGeneralist, which adapts pretrained video generators to unify action-conditioned egocentric video generation, pose estimation, and joint action-video generation. Our role-adaptive action renderer provides video-native representations for multidirectional action-video learning, making metric motion usable as both a spatial control signal and a recoverable generation target. Cross-stream action-video coupling establishes close correspondence between metric motion and visual dynamics through lightweight adaptation while preserving the pretrained visual prior. Together, these designs establish a generalist framework spanning five action-video tasks. Despite adaptation only on controlled laboratory recordings, EgoGeneralist generalizes to diverse unseen scenes and interactions with effective action control and visual quality, bridging pretrained visual knowledge and metric 3D human motion.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08477
Head pose estimation is important for human computer interaction and driver monitoring, but many image based methods remain too costly for resource constrained deployment. We propose STAG-Net, a structure-aware attention over landmark groups for lightweight head Pose estimation that estimates head pose from facial landmarks using movement aware selection, spatial clustering, compact DeepSet encoders, self attention, and a global geometry descriptor. We develop variants using FaceMesh and Face Alignment Network landmarks and evaluate them under cross dataset and subject independent protocols on 300W-LP, AFLW2000, and BIWI. STAG-Net achieves the lowest mean absolute error among all compared landmark based methods in every evaluated setting. On BIWI frames with valid detections, the FAN variant also records the lowest overall error among all compared methods, reaching $3.51^\circ$ under cross dataset evaluation and $2.39^\circ$ under subject independent evaluation. The regressors use only 0.012 to 0.043 million parameters and 24.1 to 83.6 thousand FLOPs, about three orders of magnitude fewer FLOPs than FSA-Net. Despite including landmark extraction and regression, the FaceMesh pipeline reaches 322.9 frames per second on a Tesla T4 GPU, nearly twice the 164.5 frames per second of the fastest measured image based baseline, and 111.0 frames per second on CPU. After normalization by dataset size, STAG-Net processes training samples seven to eight times faster than FSA-Net and more than one hundred times faster than HopeNet and TokenHPE, while complete training finishes within 28 minutes. These results show that STAG-Net combines leading landmark based accuracy with substantially lower training and inference cost.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07828
For many computer vision tasks, neural networks can be trained to produce a low average error, yet they still fail on seemingly simple scenes. Reducing these failures requires first finding them, but they may not be in a fixed dataset. We study procedural adversarial learning (PAL), a framework of minimax training and adversarial evaluation which searches the input space of a procedural generator for difficult instances. The procedural generator is an interpretable program mapping a low-dimensional vector of control parameters (e.g. layout, lighting, pose) to a rendered image and its label. We introduce the Simple-PAT algorithm, which uses zeroth-order optimization in the procedural generator's parameter space to propose adversarial training samples that are generated on demand. We also create PAL-Dojo, a collection of efficient procedural generators for surface normal estimation, image segmentation, and human pose estimation. Against a cross-model black-box adversary with 50M aggregate queries, Simple-PAT reduces worst-case error by a geometric mean of 3.15x compared to standard training and 2.63x compared to the strongest robust training baseline. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06890
This paper introduces an innovative virtual reality (VR) exergame system designed to gamify High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) workouts through 11 predefined combo moves, including squat-punch combinations, bilateral arm strikes, and diagonal stretch combos. Unlike conventional tracking methods that often rely on wearable motion capture suits or limited headset-based sensors, our system uses a standard smartphone camera placed on a tripod to capture full-body movement. This approach offers a cost-effective and scalable alternative, particularly well-suited to the fast, dynamic motions typical of HIIT routines. The smartphone footage is processed in real time using a pose estimation algorithm, with extracted biomechanical data analyzed by a backend server built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), Anthropic's open standard for connecting AI models to structured data sources and tools, and a GPT-4o large language model. The system generates personalized assessments of form accuracy, movement efficiency, exercise intensity, and potential injury risks, tailored specifically to high-impact, time-sensitive exercises. A within-subject study involving 20 participants (ages 18-25) compared experiences in VR and Non-VR HIIT sessions. Results indicated significantly higher enjoyment (Mean = 3.5 vs 2.8, p = 0.02), improved immersion/focus (Mean = 3.2 vs 2.8, p = 0.03), and increased likelihood to recommend (Mean = 3.2 vs 2.7, p = 0.04) under the VR condition. Confidence to continue did not differ significantly between conditions (p = 0.15), while perceived intensity remained comparable. The MCP system showed strong agreement with expert evaluation (87.5%, N = 10 sessions, one certified trainer), supporting its reliability as a feedback tool.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06734
Efficient video human pose estimation must balance localisation accuracy, motion quality, and energy cost. We present SpikePose, a lightweight video pose estimator that pairs a frame-reset, single-step spiking encoder with motion-aligned heatmap memory (MAM). The encoder supplies per-frame spatial evidence, while MAM estimates joint displacement, aligns historical heatmaps, and adaptively fuses them with current predictions. By confining temporal reasoning to a compact, lightweight module outside the spiking backbone, SpikePose helps bridge the gap between spiking and classical Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) on large-scale, non-event-driven video tasks. We evaluate spatial accuracy, motion errors, and estimated arithmetic energy on MPII and a fixed NTU60 Cross-Subject subset. Against the architecture-matched ANN with MAM, SpikePose cuts estimated arithmetic energy by 91.4% at a cost of just 1.12 points in head-bone-normalised PCK at 0.5 threshold (PCK_HB(0.5)). Within SpikePose, adding MAM reduces velocity and acceleration errors by 28.13% and 31.46% while slightly improving localisation, at a cost of only 0.003M parameters and 0.0023 analytical GFLOPs per frame. Code will be released on GitHub upon acceptance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06594
Loop closure detection conventionally cascades separate models for global retrieval, geometric verification, and relative pose estimation, leading to redundant computation and disconnected visual representations. We propose UniLoop, a unified framework that reuses the hierarchical representations of the pretrained geometric foundation model throughout this pipeline. A shared image encoder produces features for compact global descriptors; the same features are passed to the cross-view decoder for pairwise verification; and the original geometric predictions provide relative camera constraints for pose-graph optimization. Experiments on place recognition, loop verification, and relative pose estimation show that UniLoop improves loop-closure robustness and accuracy while reducing redundant backbone computation relative to modular pipelines. UniLoop achieves the best Recall@10 on MSLS (96.6) and Pitts30k (99.3) among the compared methods, while its verification branch reaches 95.63 AP and 96.29 ROC-AUC, surpassing the existing geometric verification baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06378
Projector-based augmented reality enables natural interaction between users and devices by overlaying digital information onto the physical world through projected imagery. A key technical requirement of such systems is accurate positional alignment between the projector and the devices. Pixel-level Visible Light Communication (PVLC) achieves this alignment without external sensing infrastructure by embedding invisible spatial codes into each projected pixel through high-speed brightness modulation that preserves image quality. However, the information that PVLC transmits is inherently planar. PVLC has therefore been limited to devices moving on a flat surface and cannot estimate the 3D pose of devices in three-dimensional space, such as aerial robots. To extend PVLC-based pose estimation to three dimensions, we formulate it as a Perspective-n-Point (PnP) problem. The 2D pixel positions that four coplanar photosensors on the device receive via PVLC serve as the image points, and their known 3D layout provides the object points. Experiments show that the proposed system estimates 3D pose with a latency of approximately 8~ms and a 3D position RMSE of 19.2~mm after Kalman filtering. These results confirm the first realization of real-time 3D pose estimation coordinated with high-quality projected image content without external sensing infrastructure.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06121
Recent advancements in sign language processing can be attributed to developments in both large-scale dataset collection and algorithmic complexity in areas such as pose estimation techniques, signal processing through Transformer models, and model optimization. However, only a handful of sign languages, such as the American, British, and German, from over 200 globally recognized sign languages, reap the benefits of such advancements, while the rest lag behind. In this study, we aim to address this technological disparity by proposing a framework for the automatic collection and preparation of sign language datasets, with very minimal human-labour intervention, using the South African Sign Language (SASL) as a testbed. Specifically, we automatically collect SASL video content using public resources such as news broadcasts. Additionally, we convert their accompanying audio streams into text using available Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) tools. Furthermore, we crop the sign language area in the videos and use gradient descent to locate valleys of non-motion to determine end-of-sentence points within long videos to create our weakly sentence-aligned parallel corpora -- the Maswao (Signs) dataset. Finally, we benchmark the weakly aligned dataset on the task of Sign-to-text Translation using Recurrent Neural Networks and Transformer models to compare their individual intricacies. Our results show that Transformer models proposed in the literature outperform recurrent baselines, with the best-performing Transformer achieving BLEU-1 to BLEU-4 scores of 13.78, 5.21, 2.52, and 1.54, respectively, as well as ChrF = 18.09 and ROUGE-L = 10.51. These results indicate that the task remains promising and warrants further investigations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02903
Self-supervised learning relies on asymmetry between what a model observes and what it must explain. Recent methods learn 3D geometry from unposed images by predicting cameras and scene structure, then rendering held-out views. To avoid trivial solutions, they impose this asymmetry in the input space, restricting how views interact through separate branches or masked attention. We revisit this design with geometric accuracy, rather than rendering quality, as the main objective. When a held-out view lies between context views, the context already constrains the geometry it observes. We therefore impose the asymmetry in the 3D representation space, excluding held-out views only from the reconstructed scene while a shared backbone uses all views for correspondence. This improves depth and pose estimation over input-space designs. We further exploit view density: sparse and dense observations depict the same scene but provide different amounts of correspondence. Aligning sparse-context features with dense-context features supplies a geometric training signal alongside rendering, without a pretrained geometric teacher. We additionally align features with a frozen vision foundation model, which brings further gains. None of these signals requires geometric annotation, and the resulting model improves geometry estimation over prior self-supervised methods. Controlled experiments isolate the contribution of each component, and self-supervised pretraining also improves subsequent supervised training.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.42092
Pose estimation is a computer vision task used to estimate a skeleton of dynamic systems to predict future movements. Most of the research in this direction is based on a supervised learning approach which requires a massive amount of labeled datasets. In this paper, a self-supervised three-stage model based on a contrastive learning approach is introduced for estimating a skeleton of dynamic construction machines; such as excavators without using any labeled images for the first stage. The whole model structure is divided into three stages: the pre-train stage using the SimCLR contrastive approach, and two fine-tuning stages for the transfer learning and the downstream task. The model can leverage the features and learn from a huge unlabeled dataset called ACID to two small datasets generated from NVIDIA Isaac and MATLAB Simscape simulators as well as transfer the knowledge to a smaller dataset with a ratio of 3.5% from the original ACID dataset. The results show that the proposed approach can improve the accuracy of pose estimation for heavy construction machines in real images by 11% and 13% in comparison to the normal self-supervised approach with two backbones ResNet-50 and HRNet-W32, respectively.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41673
Collecting naturalistic human manipulation demonstrations with accurate contact force and hand pose is essential for robot dexterous manipulation policy and foundational world model learning - yet no existing wearable platform provides both calibrated fingertip force sensing and occlusion-resilient hand tracking in a form factor that preserves natural manipulation behavior. We present Tactus, a textile-integrated sensing glove that co-optimizes three design pillars: (1) a thin, conformal 3D-knit form factor (1.5 mm fingertip stackup) designed to minimize interference with natural manipulation, (2) strategically placed capacitive tactile sensors at manipulation-relevant regions informed by empirical contact studies, and (3) IMU-fused pose tracking that maintains accuracy through the hand-object occlusions where manipulation data is most valuable. Tactus includes a documented calibration pipeline for cross-glove consistency and per-session calibration for subject-dependent correction. To enable objective comparison, we introduce standardized benchmarking protocols for tactile force regression and hand pose estimation, and apply them to Tactus and two commercially available tactile gloves - to our knowledge the first quantitative cross-platform evaluation of this kind. Tactus resolves a minimum detectable force of 0.59 N at 95% confidence, 1.6 - 2.7x lower than the commercial baselines, and with 0.87 cross-participant consistency, while our pose tracking sustains 11.0 mm fingertip keypoint relative error during manipulation, when occlusion is heaviest. We show that these combined signals support object property estimation, slip detection, and representative recording of hand-object interaction - yielding demonstration data with the fidelity required for contact-aware manipulation policies and world models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39076
Multi-source millimeter-wave (mmWave) observations offer an opportunity to learn human representations reusable across sensing tasks. However, sparse detections and multipath effects make these observations unstable, challenging existing point cloud pretraining methods. We propose PT$^3$, a prototype-guided self-supervised pretraining framework for mmWave human point clouds. PT$^3$ represents local states in spatial regions as sparse compositions of shared prototypes and learns their temporal evolution through autoregressive prediction. Observation consistency further stabilizes representations under radar perturbations. After pretraining on unlabeled sequences from multiple sources, the same frozen encoder supports action classification, dense point generation, joint pose estimation, and future motion prediction on datasets not used for pretraining. Across these tasks, PT$^3$ outperforms the compared pretraining baselines and achieves competitive or superior performance to task-specific models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38551
Recent advances in interactive world models have made it possible to generate controllable, dynamic environments from action inputs. Yet current models struggle to maintain coherence beyond roughly one minute of rollout, a limitation rooted not in model capacity but in the scarcity of long-horizon training data. Existing gameplay video datasets typically consist of clips under ten seconds, with captions that describe whole clips in coarse and undifferentiated text, which is insufficient for controllable long-horizon generation. We address this with GameVerse, a minute-scale gameplay video dataset purpose-built for long-horizon interactive world modeling. GameVerse contains 69.7K clips spanning 1,655 hours and 349.6 million frames across diverse first- and third-person gameplay, including 1,358 hours of continuous two-minute sequences, an order of magnitude longer than prior datasets. Clips pass through a unified pipeline of scene-consistent segmentation, quality filtering, camera pose estimation, and event-based caption annotation. Each clip is paired with a temporally stable camera trajectory that remains coherent across minutes, together with captions that separate static scene context from dynamic foreground events and align to event boundaries rather than fixed time windows. Comprehensive analysis shows that GameVerse surpasses existing public datasets in scale, diversity, and annotation quality. Experiments further demonstrate that training on GameVerse substantially extends the temporal horizon of interactive world models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37257
Sparse event responses produce uneven keypoint errors whose effects on spacecraft pose depend on correspondence geometry and the reliability of successive observations. We present a reliability-aware framework connecting polarity--time localization, geometric recovery, event--CAD refinement, and trajectory optimization. A three-branch representation combines positive events, negative events, and recent-event timing through cross-branch attention and gating, followed by spatiotemporal aggregation. An ordered semantic-point head estimates relative correspondence precision for geometrically constrained pose recovery. Event-edge and CAD-projection agreement then guide local pose refinement under keypoint-geometry safeguards. At the sequence level, a ten-dimensional descriptor combines heatmap shape, reprojection consistency, and geometric conditioning to set time-aligned observation scales. On the official SPADES challenge test set, the complete system achieves a combined pose score of 0.0474, approximately 5.4\% below PASAN+IRIS. Validation ablations reduce the score from 0.0772 for base localization with uniform PnP to 0.0514 for the complete cascade; on identical single-frame observations, quality weighting reduces the score from 0.0549 with constant-weight optimization to 0.0514.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36625