Physical based motion reconstruction from videos using musculoskeletal model

Abstract

We propose a novel method that combines human pose estimation and physical simulation of character animation. Our approach allows characters to learn from the actor's skills captured in videos and subsequently reconstruct the motions with high fidelity in a physically simulated environment. Firstly, we model the character based on the human musculoskeletal system and build a complete dynamics model of the proposed system using the Lagrange equations of motion. Next, we employ the pose estimation method to process the input video and generate human reference motion. Finally, we design a hierarchical control framework consisting of a trajectory tracking layer and a muscle control layer. The trajectory tracking layer aims to minimize the difference between the reference motion pose and the actual output pose, while the muscle control layer aims to minimize the difference between the target torque and the actual output muscle force. The two layers interact by passing parameters through a proportional differential controller until the desired learning objective is achieved. A series of complex experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can learn to produce comparable high-quality motions with high similarity from videos of different complexity levels and remains stable in the presence of muscle contracture weakness perturbations.