Open Access

Daniel Bermuth, Alexander Poeppel, Wolfgang Reif

• Human pose forecasting predicts future human poses from past observations for applications including action recognition, sports analysis, and human-robot interaction. However, progress in the field is difficult to assess because reported results often rely on heterogeneous preprocessing, inconsistent metric implementations, and partially released artifacts. This paper re-examines human pose forecasting as an evaluation problem by auditing a wide range of recent forecasting methods, identifying several reproducibility issues, and introducing a unified training and evaluation pipeline for absolute pose forecasting. Under this unified protocol, mature cross-domain sequence models adapted from speech recognition provide strong baselines and obtain the lowest errors among the evaluated models. To study deployment-relevant noise, a paired clean/detector-noisy dataset variant is introduced using poses generated by a pose-estimation model. The experiments show that detector-generated posesHuman pose forecasting predicts future human poses from past observations for applications including action recognition, sports analysis, and human-robot interaction. However, progress in the field is difficult to assess because reported results often rely on heterogeneous preprocessing, inconsistent metric implementations, and partially released artifacts. This paper re-examines human pose forecasting as an evaluation problem by auditing a wide range of recent forecasting methods, identifying several reproducibility issues, and introducing a unified training and evaluation pipeline for absolute pose forecasting. Under this unified protocol, mature cross-domain sequence models adapted from speech recognition provide strong baselines and obtain the lowest errors among the evaluated models. To study deployment-relevant noise, a paired clean/detector-noisy dataset variant is introduced using poses generated by a pose-estimation model. The experiments show that detector-generated poses cause substantial performance degradation compared with clean motion-capture inputs, but that part of this degradation can be recovered by adapting the forecaster on detector-generated pose sequences.…