Long Term Motion Prediction Using Keyposes

Long term human motion prediction is essential in safety-critical applications such as human-robot interaction and autonomous driving. In this paper we show that to achieve long term forecasting, predicting human pose at every time instant is unnecessary. Instead, it is more effective to predict a few keyposes and approximate intermediate ones by interpolating the keyposes. We demonstrate that our approach enables us to predict realistic motions for up to 5 seconds in the future, which is far longer than the typical 1 second encountered in the literature. Furthermore, because we model future keyposes probabilistically, we can generate multiple plausible future motions by sampling at inference time. Over this extended time period, our predictions are more realistic, more diverse and better preserve the motion dynamics than those state-of-the-art methods yield.