Regressive Gaussian Process Latent Variable Model for Few-Frame Human Motion Prediction

Human motion prediction has always been an interesting research topic in computer vision and robotics. It means forecasting human movements in the future conditioning on historical 3-dimensional human skeleton sequences. Existing predicting algorithms usually rely on extensive annotated or non-annotated motion capture data and are non-adaptive. This paper addresses the problem of few-frame human motion prediction, in the spirit of the recent progress on manifold learning. More precisely, our approach is based on the insight that achieving an accurate prediction relies on a sufficiently linear expression in the latent space from a few training data in observation space. To accomplish this, we propose Regressive Gaussian Process Latent Variable Model (RGPLVM) that introduces a novel regressive kernel function for the model training. By doing so, our model produces a linear mapping from the training data space to the latent space, while effectively transforming the prediction of human motion in physical space to the linear regression analysis in the latent space equivalent. The comparison with two learning motion prediction approaches (the state-of-the-art meta learning and the classical LSTM-3LR) demonstrate that our GPLVM significantly improves the prediction performance on various of actions in the small-sample size regime.