Publications


GroundLink: A Dataset Unifying Human Body Movement and Ground Reaction Dynamics



SIGGRAPH Asia 2023. December 12–15, 2023, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Xingjian Han, Benjamin Senderling, Stanley To, Deepak Kumar, Emily Whiting, Jun Saito
Video


Abstract

The physical plausibility of human motions is vital to various applications in fields including but not limited to graphics, animation, robotics, vision, biomechanics, and sports science. While fully simulating human motions with physics is an extreme challenge, we hypothesize that we can treat this complexity as a black box in a data-driven manner if we focus on the ground contact, and have sufficient observations of physics and human activities in the real world. To prove our hypothesis, we present GroundLink, a unified dataset comprised of captured ground reaction force (GRF) and center of pressure (CoP) synchronized to standard kinematic motion captures. GRF and CoP of GroundLink are not simulated but captured at high temporal resolution using force platforms embedded in the ground for uncompromising measurement accuracy. This dataset contains 368 processed motion trials (~1.59M recorded frames) with 19 different movements including locomotion and weight-shifting actions such as tennis swings to signify the importance of capturing physics paired with kinematics. GroundLinkNet, our benchmark neural network model trained with GroundLink, supports our hypothesis by predicting GRFs and CoPs accurately and plausibly on unseen motions from various sources. The dataset, code, and benchmark models are made public for further research on various downstream tasks leveraging the rich physics information at https://csr.bu.edu/groundlink/.

Paper

arXiv         Paper (PDF, full resolution)         Supplemental

Source Code

Github         Data

Bibtex

@inproceedings{
han2023groundlink,
title = {GroundLink: A Dataset Unifying Human Body Movement and Ground Reaction Dynamics},
author={Han, Xingjian and Senderling, Benjamin and To, Stanley and Kumar, Deepak and Whiting, Emily and Saito, Jun},
booktitle={ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 Conference Proceedings},
year = {2023},
pages = {1--10},
}