# Physics-Guided Human Motion Capture with Pose Probability Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.09910 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09910/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14916/) (2022)
- [Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14217/) (2022)
- [MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.15001/) (2022)
- [VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05656/) (2019)
- [PhysDiff: Physics-Guided Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02500/) (2022)
- [RMPE: Regional Multi-person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00137/) (2016)
- [HuMoR: 3D Human Motion Model for Robust Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04668/) (2021)
- [Learning 3D Human Dynamics from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01601/) (2018)
- [HybrIK: A Hybrid Analytical-Neural Inverse Kinematics Solution for 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14672/) (2020)
- [CLIFF: Carrying Location Information in Full Frames into Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00571/) (2022)
- [Monocular Total Capture: Posing Face, Body, and Hands in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01598/) (2018)
- [Physical Inertial Poser (PIP): Physics-aware Real-time Human Motion Tracking from Sparse Inertial Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08528/) (2022)
- [VNect: Real-time 3D Human Pose Estimation with a Single RGB Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01583/) (2017)
- [SimPoE: Simulated Character Control for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00683/) (2021)
- [Exploiting temporal context for 3D human pose estimation in the wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04266/) (2019)
- [Dynamics-Regulated Kinematic Policy for Egocentric Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05969/) (2021)
- [DiffPose: Toward More Reliable 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16940/) (2022)
- [3D Human Motion Estimation via Motion Compression and Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03789/) (2020)
- [Generating Multiple Hypotheses for 3D Human Pose Estimation with Mixture Density Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05547/) (2019)
- [Ego-Pose Estimation and Forecasting as Real-Time PD Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03173/) (2019)
- [Probabilistic Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13788/) (2021)
- [Human Body Model Fitting by Learned Gradient Descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08474/) (2020)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation by Generation and Ordinal Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01324/) (2019)
- [Neural Monocular 3D Human Motion Capture with Physical Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01057/) (2021)
- [Physics-based Human Motion Estimation and Synthesis from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09913/) (2021)
- [DiffPose: Multi-hypothesis Human Pose Estimation using Diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16487/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [PhysPT: Physics-aware Pretrained Transformer for Estimating Human Dynamics from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04430/) (2024)
- [Bridging the Visual-to-Physical Gap: Physically Aligned Representations for Fall Risk Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13410/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Incorporating physics in human motion capture to avoid artifacts like floating, foot sliding, and ground penetration is a promising direction. Existing solutions always adopt kinematic results as reference motions, and the physics is treated as a post-processing module. However, due to the depth ambiguity, monocular motion capture inevitably suffers from noises, and the noisy reference often leads to failure for physics-based tracking. To address the obstacles, our key-idea is to employ physics as denoising guidance in the reverse diffusion process to reconstruct physically plausible human motion from a modeled pose probability distribution. Specifically, we first train a latent gaussian model that encodes the uncertainty of 2D-to-3D lifting to facilitate reverse diffusion. Then, a physics module is constructed to track the motion sampled from the distribution. The discrepancies between the tracked motion and image observation are used to provide explicit guidance for the reverse diffusion model to refine the motion. With several iterations, the physics-based tracking and kinematic denoising promote each other to generate a physically plausible human motion. Experimental results show that our method outperforms previous physics-based methods in both joint accuracy and success rate. More information can be found at urlhttps://github.com/Me-Ditto/Physics-Guided-Mocap.