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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21654 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21654/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08128/) (2016)
- [VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05656/) (2019)
- [Learning 3D Human Dynamics from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01601/) (2018)
- [HigherHRNet: Scale-Aware Representation Learning for Bottom-Up Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10357/) (2019)
- [CrowdPose: Efficient Crowded Scenes Pose Estimation and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00324/) (2018)
- [InterGen: Diffusion-based Multi-human Motion Generation under Complex Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05684/) (2023)
- [WHAM: Reconstructing World-grounded Humans with Accurate 3D Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07531/) (2023)
- [AlphaPose: Whole-Body Regional Multi-Person Pose Estimation and Tracking in Real-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03375/) (2022)
- [Physical Inertial Poser (PIP): Physics-aware Real-time Human Motion Tracking from Sparse Inertial Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08528/) (2022)
- [PifPaf: Composite Fields for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06593/) (2019)
- [Nymeria: A Massive Collection of Multimodal Egocentric Daily Motion in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09905/) (2024)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation = 2D Pose Estimation + Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06524/) (2016)
- [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)
- [TRAM: Global Trajectory and Motion of 3D Humans from in-the-wild Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17346/) (2024)
- [Multi-HMR: Multi-Person Whole-Body Human Mesh Recovery in a Single Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14654/) (2024)
- [EMDB: The Electromagnetic Database of Global 3D Human Pose and Shape in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16894/) (2023)
- [Ego-Body Pose Estimation via Ego-Head Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04636/) (2022)
- [LiveCap: Real-time Human Performance Capture from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02648/) (2018)
- [xR-EgoPose: Egocentric 3D Human Pose from an HMD Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10045/) (2019)
- [Transformer Inertial Poser: Real-time Human Motion Reconstruction from Sparse IMUs with Simultaneous Terrain Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15720/) (2022)
- [PromptHMR: Promptable Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06397/) (2025)
- [EgoHumans: An Egocentric 3D Multi-Human Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16487/) (2023)
- [IMUPoser: Full-Body Pose Estimation using IMUs in Phones, Watches, and Earbuds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12518/) (2023)
- [Conditional Directed Graph Convolution for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07797/) (2021)
- [EgoLocate: Real-time Motion Capture, Localization, and Mapping with Sparse Body-mounted Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01599/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [EgoExoMoCap: Distributed Ego-Exo Human Motion Capture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15868/) (2026)
- [Ultra Diffusion Poser: Diffusion-Based Human Motion Tracking From Sparse Inertial Sensors and Ranging-Based Between-Sensor Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02153/) (2026)
- [IMU-HOI: A Symbiotic Framework for Coherent Human-Object Interaction and Motion Capture via Contact-Conscious Inertial Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28604/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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 individuals, as inertial cues are inherently self-referential and provide no direct spatial reference for 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 multiple individuals. 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 data, showing the promise of IMU+UWB-based multi-human motion capture in the wild. Code, models, dataset: https://github.com/eth-siplab/GroupInertialPoser