Scene-aware Human Motion Forecasting via Mutual Distance Prediction

In this paper, we tackle the problem of scene-aware 3D human motion forecasting. A key challenge of this task is to predict future human motions that are consistent with the scene, by modelling the 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 motion unconstrained. To address this limitation, we propose to model the human-scene interaction with 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 develop a pipeline with two prediction steps that first predicts the future mutual distances from the past human motion sequence and the scene, and then forecasts the future human motion conditioning on the predicted mutual distances. During training, we explicitly encourage consistency between the predicted poses and the mutual distances. Our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real datasets.