Meng, Zhaorui, Yin, Lu, Hou, Yangqing, Chen, Anjun, Guo, Shihui and Qin, Yipeng  ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1551-9126
2026.
Improving sparse IMU-based motion capture with motion label smoothing.
Presented at: The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2026,
Singapore,
20-27 January 2026.
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
, vol.40
(10)
Washington DC, USA:
AAAI Press,
pp. 8034-8042.
10.1609/aaai.v40i10.37749
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Abstract
Sparse Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) based human motion capture has gained significant momentum, driven by the adaptation of fundamental AI tools such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and transformers that are tailored for temporal and spatial modeling. Despite these achievements, current research predominantly focuses on pipeline and architectural designs, with comparatively little attention given to regularization methods, highlighting a critical gap in developing a comprehensive AI toolkit for this task. To bridge this gap, we propose motion label smoothing, a novel method that adapts the classic label smoothing strategy from classification to the sparse IMU-based motion capture task. Specifically, we first demonstrate that a naive adaptation of label smoothing, including simply blending a uniform vector or a "uniform" motion representation (e.g., dataset-average motion or a canonical T-pose), is suboptimal; and argue that a proper adaptation requires increasing the entropy of the smoothed labels. Second, we conduct a thorough analysis of human motion labels, identifying three critical properties: 1) Temporal Smoothness, 2) Joint Correlation, and 3) Low-Frequency Dominance, and show that conventional approaches to entropy enhancement (e.g., blending Gaussian noise) are ineffective as they disrupt these properties. Finally, we propose the blend of a novel skeleton-based Perlin noise for motion label smoothing, designed to raise label entropy while satisfying motion properties. Extensive experiments applying our motion label smoothing to three state-of-the-art methods across four real-world IMU datasets demonstrate its effectiveness and robust generalization (plug-and-play) capability.
| Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item - published (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Date Type: | Publication |
| Status: | Published |
| Schools: | Schools > Computer Science & Informatics |
| Publisher: | AAAI Press |
| ISSN: | 2159-5399 |
| Date of First Compliant Deposit: | 17 November 2025 |
| Date of Acceptance: | 7 November 2025 |
| Last Modified: | 21 Apr 2026 10:07 |
| URI: | https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/182431 |
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