# Robust Real-Time Monocular Human Pose Estimation with Insole-Based Sensor Fusion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19494 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19494/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05656/) (2019)
- [ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12484/) (2022)
- [3D human pose estimation in video with temporal convolutions and semi-supervised training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11742/) (2018)
- [Humans in 4D: Reconstructing and Tracking Humans with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20091/) (2023)
- [Effective Whole-body Pose Estimation with Two-stages Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15880/) (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)
- [MotionBERT: A Unified Perspective on Learning Human Motion Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06551/) (2022)
- [RTMPose: Real-Time Multi-Person Pose Estimation based on MMPose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07399/) (2023)
- [Towards 3D Human Pose Estimation in the Wild: a Weakly-supervised Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02447/) (2017)
- [BlazePose: On-device Real-time Body Pose tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10204/) (2020)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation via Intuitive Physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18246/) (2023)
- [PoseFormerV2: Exploring Frequency Domain for Efficient and Robust 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17472/) (2023)
- [PromptHMR: Promptable Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06397/) (2025)
- [YOLO-Pose: Enhancing YOLO for Multi Person Pose Estimation Using Object Keypoint Similarity Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06806/) (2022)
- [Playing for 3D Human Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07588/) (2021)
- [MotionAGFormer: Enhancing 3D Human Pose Estimation with a Transformer-GCNFormer Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16288/) (2023)
- [RTMO: Towards High-Performance One-Stage Real-Time Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07526/) (2023)
- [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)
- [MobilePoser: Real-Time Full-Body Pose Estimation and 3D Human Translation from IMUs in Mobile Consumer Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12492/) (2025)
- [MMVP: A Multimodal MoCap Dataset with Vision and Pressure Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17610/) (2024)
- [SAT-HMR: Real-Time Multi-Person 3D Mesh Estimation via Scale-Adaptive Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19824/) (2024)
- [HARMamba: Efficient and Lightweight Wearable Sensor Human Activity Recognition Based on Bidirectional Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20183/) (2024)
- [MotionPRO: Exploring the Role of Pressure in Human MoCap and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05046/) (2025)
- [P2LHAP:Wearable sensor-based human activity recognition, segmentation and forecast through Patch-to-Label Seq2Seq Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08214/) (2024)
- [Continuous locomotion mode recognition and gait phase estimation based on a shank-mounted IMU with artificial neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00861/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Real-time monocular human pose estimation is an important sensing component for human-centered intelligent systems. While recent camera-based methods have achieved impressive accuracy, fundamental challenges persist, particularly when visual observations are incomplete, such as during lower-body occlusion or short out-of-frame intervals. In these challenging but common scenarios, vision-only systems often struggle to reconstruct physically plausible lower-limb motion and reliable foot-ground contact. Due to the highly unobtrusive and wearable nature of smart insoles, this paper investigates whether simple plantar pressure and acceleration sensors can effectively resolve these visually induced limitations. To systematically investigate this, we first collect a synchronized multimodal dataset and then propose a part-decoupled temporal fusion framework. The proposed model fuses foot-sensing features into the lower-body branch to compensate for incomplete visual evidence, while a lightweight coordinator exchanges information between the upper- and lower-body temporal representations to maintain whole-body consistency. The framework is evaluated with three representative real-time visual backbones based on 2D keypoints, 3D landmarks, and SMPL-based human mesh recovery. We evaluate our framework on three representative real-time visual backbones. Quantitative experiments demonstrate that incorporating simple foot sensors consistently improves pose accuracy, motion smoothness, and gait-related measurements over vision-only baselines, with the most significant gains observed under occlusion and short visual-dropout conditions. Ultimately, our results demonstrate that unobtrusive foot sensing provides vital and complementary physical observability when camera observations are temporarily unavailable.
