# Gravity-guided Contact Dynamics Estimation from 3D Human Motions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.08133 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08133/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [PhysDiff: Physics-Guided Human Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02500/) (2022)
- [HuMoR: 3D Human Motion Model for Robust Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04668/) (2021)
- [SimPoE: Simulated Character Control for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00683/) (2021)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation via Intuitive Physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18246/) (2023)
- [Contact and Human Dynamics from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11678/) (2020)
- [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)
- [D&D: Learning Human Dynamics from Dynamic Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08790/) (2022)
- [Differentiable Dynamics for Articulated 3d Human Motion Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12256/) (2022)
- [Trajectory Optimization for Physics-Based Reconstruction of 3d Human Pose from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12292/) (2022)
- [Neural MoCon: Neural Motion Control for Physically Plausible Human Motion Capture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14065/) (2022)
- [PhysPT: Physics-aware Pretrained Transformer for Estimating Human Dynamics from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04430/) (2024)
- [UnderPressure: Deep Learning for Foot Contact Detection, Ground Reaction Force Estimation and Footskate Cleanup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04598/) (2022)
- [GroundLink: A Dataset Unifying Human Body Movement and Ground Reaction Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03930/) (2023)
- [AddBiomechanics Dataset: Capturing the Physics of Human Motion at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18537/) (2024)
- [ImDy: Human Inverse Dynamics from Imitated Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17610/) (2024)
- [Optimal-state Dynamics Estimation for Physics-based Human Motion Capture from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07795/) (2024)
- [Image-based Stability Quantification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11443/) (2022)
- [Physics-informed Ground Reaction Dynamics from Human Motion Capture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01340/) (2025)
- [FootFormer: Estimating Stability from Visual Input](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19170/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Human-Centric Intelligence in the Era of Foundation Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18184/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Ground contact forces acting on the human body, are crucial for biomechanics studies or sport performance analysis. Prior methods rely on force plates or pressure mats to collect ground contact dynamics, limiting their applicability to carefully controlled settings. A more scalable solution is to estimate the dynamics directly from motion capture data. Recent approaches only roughly estimate the ground contact dynamics from the vertical distance between the body and the ground plane, which cannot capture the complex pressure distribution of all contact points. To this end, we propose GraCE -- Gravity-guided Contact Dynamics Estimation, a novel full-body contact dynamics model for human motions using a realistic influence of body mass distribution and gravity. We use the human's center of gravity to estimate the ground contacts based on its relative distance to the human body. The applied force on each contact is estimated via the product of predicted contact probabilities and the total exterior force computed from the center of mass trajectory. We outperform related work on the GroundLink dataset for ground reaction force estimation, and on the MOYO dataset for detailed contact pressure prediction. The code is published at https://github.com/cuongle1206/GraCE