SUPER: Seated Upper Body Pose Estimation using mmWave Radars

Abstract

In industrial countries, adults spend considerably amount of time sedentary each day at work, driving and during activities of daily living. Characterizing the seated upper body human poses using mmWave radars is an important, yet under-studied topic with many applications in human-machine interaction and transportation and road safety. In this work, we devise SUPER, a framework for seated upper body human pose estimation that utilizes dual-mmWave radars in close proximity. A novel masking algorithm is proposed to coherently fuses data from the radars to generate intensity and Doppler point clouds with complementary information for high-motion but small radar cross section areas (e.g., upper extremities) and low-motion but large RCS areas (e.g. torso). A lightweight neural network extracts both global and local features of upper body and output pose parameters for the Skinned Multi-Person Linear (SMPL) model. Extensive leave-one-subject-out experiments on various motion sequences from multiple subjects show that SUPER outperforms a state-of-the-art baseline method by 30% -- 184%. We also demonstrate its utility in a simple downstream tasks for hand-object interaction.

Demo Examples