# Progressive Inertial Poser: Progressive Real-Time Kinematic Chain Estimation for 3D Full-Body Pose from Three IMU Sensors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05336 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05336/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [Physical Inertial Poser (PIP): Physics-aware Real-time Human Motion Tracking from Sparse Inertial Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08528/) (2022)
- [AvatarPoser: Articulated Full-Body Pose Tracking from Sparse Motion Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13784/) (2022)
- [Sparse Inertial Poser: Automatic 3D Human Pose Estimation from Sparse IMUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08014/) (2017)
- [Avatars Grow Legs: Generating Smooth Human Motion from Sparse Tracking Inputs with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08577/) (2023)
- [SRNet: Improving Generalization in 3D Human Pose Estimation with a Split-and-Recombine Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09389/) (2020)
- [Transformer Inertial Poser: Real-time Human Motion Reconstruction from Sparse IMUs with Simultaneous Terrain Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15720/) (2022)
- [FLAG: Flow-based 3D Avatar Generation from Sparse Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05789/) (2022)
- [IMUPoser: Full-Body Pose Estimation using IMUs in Phones, Watches, and Earbuds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12518/) (2023)
- [LoBSTr: Real-time Lower-body Pose Prediction from Sparse Upper-body Tracking Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01500/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Inertial Poser (DynaIP): Part-Based Motion Dynamics Learning for Enhanced Human Pose Estimation with Sparse Inertial Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02196/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Multi-view and Temporal Fusing Transformer for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05092/) (2021)
- [Scene-Aware 3D Multi-Human Motion Capture from a Single Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05175/) (2023)
- [SmartMocap: Joint Estimation of Human and Camera Motion using Uncalibrated RGB Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13906/) (2022)
- [HOOV: Hand Out-Of-View Tracking for Proprioceptive Interaction using Inertial Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07016/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Towards Real-World Wearable Motion Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09780/) (2026)
- [Human Motion Estimation with Everyday Wearables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21209/) (2025)
- [One Sensor, Whole Body - 3D Body Pose from a Single Consumer Earbud IMU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34978/) (2026)
- [Reliability-Gated Fusion of Consumer Head and Foot IMUs for Lower-Body 3D Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35764/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The motion capture system that supports full-body virtual representation is of key significance for virtual reality. Compared to vision-based systems, full-body pose estimation from sparse tracking signals is not limited by environmental conditions or recording range. However, previous works either face the challenge of wearing additional sensors on the pelvis and lower-body or rely on external visual sensors to obtain global positions of key joints. To improve the practicality of the technology for virtual reality applications, we estimate full-body poses using only inertial data obtained from three Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors worn on the head and wrists, thereby reducing the complexity of the hardware system. In this work, we propose a method called Progressive Inertial Poser (ProgIP) for human pose estimation, which combines neural network estimation with a human dynamics model, considers the hierarchical structure of the kinematic chain, and employs a multi-stage progressive network estimation with increased depth to reconstruct full-body motion in real time. The encoder combines Transformer Encoder and bidirectional LSTM (TE-biLSTM) to flexibly capture the temporal dependencies of the inertial sequence, while the decoder based on multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) transforms high-dimensional features and accurately projects them onto Skinned Multi-Person Linear (SMPL) model parameters. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results on multiple public datasets show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods with the same inputs, and is comparable to recent works using six IMU sensors.