Future Pose Prediction from 3D Human Skeleton Sequence with Surrounding Situation

Human pose prediction is vital for robot applications such as human–robot interaction and autonomous control of robots. Recent prediction methods often use deep learning and are based on a 3D human skeleton sequence to predict future poses. Even if the starting motions of 3D human skeleton sequences are very similar, their future poses will have variety. It makes it difficult to predict future poses only from a given human skeleton sequence. Meanwhile, when carefully observing human motions, we can find that human motions are often affected by objects or other people around the target person. We consider that the presence of surrounding objects is an important clue for the prediction. This paper proposes a method for predicting the future skeleton sequence by incorporating the surrounding situation into the prediction model. The proposed method uses a feature of an image around the target person as the surrounding information. We confirmed the performance improvement of the proposed method through evaluations on publicly available datasets. As a result, the prediction accuracy was improved for object-related and human-related motions.