Scene-aware Human Motion Forecasting via Mutual Distance Prediction

Chaoyue Xing*, Wei Mao, Miaomiao Liu ;

"In this paper, we address the issue of scene-aware 3D human motion forecasting. A key challenge in this task is to predict future human motions that are coherent with the scene by modeling human-scene interactions. While recent works have demonstrated that explicit constraints on human-scene interactions can prevent the occurrence of ghost motion, they only provide constraints on partial human motion e.g., the global motion of the human or a few joints contacting the scene, leaving the rest of unconstrained. To address this limitation, we propose to represent the human-scene interaction using the mutual distance between the human body and the scene. Such mutual distances constrain both the local and global human motion, resulting in a whole-body motion constrained prediction. In particular, mutual distance constraints consist of two components, the signed distance of each vertex on the human mesh to the scene surface and the distance of basis scene points to the human mesh. We further introduce a global scene representation learned from a signed distance function (SDF) volume to ensure coherence between the global scene representation and the explicit constraint from the mutual distance. We develop a pipeline with two sequential steps: predicting the future mutual distances first, followed by forecasting future human motion. We explicitly ensure consistency between predicted poses and mutual distances during training. Extensive testing on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrates that our method consistently surpasses the performance of current state-of-the-art techniques."