IMU-HOI: A Symbiotic Framework for Coherent Human-Object Interaction and Motion Capture via Contact-Conscious Inertial Fusion

Lizhou Lin, Songpengcheng Xia, Zengyuan Lai, Lan Sun, Jiarui Yang, Ling Pei

Capturing full-body human motion with object interactions is crucial for AR/VR and robotics applications, yet it remains challenging for conventional vision-based methods due to occlusions and constrained capture volumes. Inertial measurement units (IMUs) offer a compelling alternative without line-of-sight requirements, but existing IMU-based motion capture assumes an isolated human and ignores object contacts and dynamics. To bridge this gap, we present IMU-HOI, a novel framework that jointly recovers full-body human pose and 6-DoF object trajectory from sparse IMUs on the body and object, explicitly modeling human-object interaction. Our approach first infers probabilistic hand-object contacts directly from IMU streams and uses them as a high-level signal to route between kinematic and inertial reasoning. These contact cues drive a three-stage fusion pipeline that refines human pose and root translation, and fuses hand-based forward kinematics with object-IMU integration for object motion, yielding coherent, drift-resilient trajectories for both human and object. Experiments on challenging human-object interaction scenarios demonstrate substantial accuracy gains over prior inertial motion capture methods. Moreover, IMU-HOI can be plugged into existing sparse-IMU mocap backbones with minimal changes, effectively extending the scope of purely inertial motion capture from isolated humans to full human-object interaction and joint motion estimation.