What and how? Jointly forecasting human action and pose

Forecasting human actions and motion trajectories address the problem of predicting what a person is going to do next and how they will perform it. This is crucial in a wide range of applications, such as assisted living and future co-robotic settings. We propose to simultaneously learn actions and action-related human motion dynamics while existing works perform them independently. This paper presents a method to jointly forecast categories of human action and skeletal joint pose, allowing the two tasks to reinforce each other. As a result, our system can predict future actions and the motion trajectories that will result. To achieve this, we define a task of joint action classification and pose regression. We employ a sequence to sequence encoder-decoder model combined with multi-task learning to forecast future actions and poses progressively before the action happens. Experimental results on two public datasets, IkeaDB and OAD, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.