Time Series Self-Attention Approach for Human Motion Forecasting: A Baseline 2D Pose Forecasting

Human motion forecasting is a necessary variable to analyze human motion concerning the safety system of the autonomous system that could be used in many applications, such as in auto-driving vehicles, auto-pilot logistics delivery, and gait analysis in the medical field. At the same time, many types of research have been conducted on 3D human motion prediction for short-term and long-term goals. This paper proposes human motion forecasting in the 2D plane as a reliable alternative in motion capture of the RGB camera attached to the devices. We proposed a method, the time series self-attention approach to generate the next future human motion in the short-term of 400 milliseconds and long-term of 1,000 milliseconds, resulting that the model could predict human motion with a slight error of 23.51 pixels for short-term prediction and 10.3 pixels for long-term prediction on average compared to the ground truth in the quantitative and qualitative evaluation. Our method outperformed the LSTM and GRU models on the Human3.6M dataset based on the MPJPE and MPJVE metrics. The average loss of correct key points varied based on the tolerance value. Our method performed better within the 50 pixels tolerance. In addition, our method is tested by images without key point annotations using OpenPose as the pose estimation method. Resulting, our method could predict well the position of the human but could not predict well for the human body pose. This research is a new baseline for the 2D human motion prediction using the Human3.6M dataset.