A Dataset and Evaluation for Complex 4D Markerless Human Motion Capture
Authors: Yeeun Park, Miqdad Naduthodi, Suryansh Kumar
Organizations: Visual and Spatial AI Lab, VCCM Section, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA · College of PVFA, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA · Department of ECEN, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA · Department of CSCE, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA
Marker-based motion capture (MoCap) systems have long been the gold standard for accurate 4D human modeling, yet their reliance on specialized hardware and markers limits scalability and real-world deployment. Advancing reliable markerless 4D human motion capture requires datasets that reflect the complexity of real-world human interactions. Yet, existing benchmarks often lack realistic multi-person dynamics, severe occlusions, and challenging interaction patterns, leading to a persistent domain gap. In this work, we present a new dataset and evaluation for complex 4D markerless human motion capture. Our proposed MoCap dataset captures both single and multi-person scenarios with intricate motions, frequent inter-person occlusions, rapid position exchanges between similarly dressed subjects, and varying subject distances. It includes synchronized multi-view RGB and depth sequences, accurate camera calibration, ground-truth 3D motion capture from a Vicon system, and corresponding SMPL/SMPL-X parameters. This setup ensures precise alignment between visual observations and motion ground truth. Benchmarking state-of-the-art markerless MoCap models reveals substantial performance degradation under these realistic conditions, highlighting limitations of current approaches. We further demonstrate that targeted fine-tuning improves generalization, validating the dataset's realism and value for model development. Our evaluation exposes critical gaps in existing models and provides a rigorous foundation for advancing robust markerless 4D human motion capture.
Figures & tables
Dataset
Multiperson
# Subjects
Sparse or Dense
RGB
Depth
Annotations
Frame
Ground Truthing
MPII [ 1 ]
No
1 Person
Dense
Yes
No
2D Pose, Activity Labels
24k
Manual
COCO [ 21 ]
No
More than 2 People
Dense
No
No
2D Pose
104k
Manual
MOYO [ 35 ]
No
1 Person
Sparse
Yes
No
3D Pose, Activity Labels, SMPL
≈ 1.75M
Activity Labels
UMPM [ 36 ]
Yes
More than 2 People
Sparse
Yes
No
3D Pose, Activity Labels, SMPL
400k
Activity Labels
CMU Kitchen [ 6 ]
No
1 Person
Sparse
Yes
No
3D Pose, Activity Labels
-
Activity Labels
HumanEva [ 33 ]
No
1 Person
Both
Yes
No
3D Pose, MoCap data
≈ 80k
MoCap
Table 1: Comparison of our dataset to other benchmark datasets
Figure 2: Example noisy depth data acquisition from RGB-D sensor and our setup compared to recent HUMAN4D setup [ 5 ] , showing raw RGB, depth image, and reconstructed SMPL mesh [ 5 ] present in our dataset.
Figure 3: Capture Environment. Professional MoCap studio for HUM4D data collection. The setup includes 44 synchronized infrared Vicon cameras for marker tracking and a multi-view RGB-D configuration for color and depth image sequence acquisition.
Figure 4: Hardware setup. Data acquisition configuration used in HUM4D. From left to right: perspective view of the RGB-D camera placement at approximately 1.45m height; top-view layout showing six cameras arranged in a circular configuration with a 3m radius; Intel RealSense D455 RGB-D sensor used for color and depth capture; and the Vicon motion capture system used for marker-based ground-truth acquisition.
Figure 5: 3D acquisition of complex human motion sequences captured under challenging conditions such as Jittering, ID Swap, Occlusion, and Near-Far Camera.
Figure 6: Overall acquisition pipeline: six synchronized multi-view RGB-D camera with Vicon MoCap system. RGB, RGB-D, and Vicon frame rate synchronization with temporal alignment is then later followed by processing and annotation to acquire accurate 3D data.
Activity
# Frames
Motion Type
Single-person
Single_Spin
3,653
Jittering
Single_Jump
4,603
Jittering
Single_RunInPlace_Stop
3,582
Jittering
Single_Furniture_SitStand
7,660
Occlusion
Multi-person
Table 2: HUM4D physical, daily and social activities.
Figure 7: Human mesh recovery on HUM4D. Predicted SMPL meshes from SPIN [ 16 ] , PARE [ 14 ] , HMR2.0 [ 7 ] , and PersPose [ 9 ] are overlaid on a challenging frame.
Frame Based Methods
3DPW [ 37 ]
HUM4D
PARE [ 14 ]
82.0
177.2
SPIN [ 16 ]
59.2
179.1
HMR2.0 a [ 7 ]
81.3
180.0
PersPose [ 9 ]
39.1
151.9
Table 3: Baseline PA-MPJPE result on HUM4D compared to 3DPW on which these methods were originally trained/tested.
Figure 8: Representative examples of motion activities in HUM4D grouped by motion type.
Figure 9: Representative examples from HUM4D. Each example includes the body-model or MoCap visualization, the synchronized RGB image, and the corresponding depth map.
Figure 10: Top level hierarchy of HUM4D. The dataset is first grouped by motion type, and each motion type contains a set of activity folders.
Figure 11: Example lower level hierarchy of HUM4D. Within each activity, the data is further organized by recording setting, take index, multi-view camera streams, and associated annotation files such as mocap data and model data.
Motion Type
PARE
SPIN
HMR2.0
PersPose
Jittering
177.6
175.6
181.1
197.3
Occlusion
157.1
168.1
148.4
166.1
Near-Far Camera
178.6
170.6
205.7
209.9
ID Swap
265.3
268.7
260.8
267.7
Overall
185.7
189.2
184.9
199.2
Table 4: PA-MPJPE (mm) broken down by motion type on HUM4D.
Optical motion capture delivers high-fidelity human motion, but its reliance on strict marker layouts and clean trajectories severely limits its real-world applicability. In practice, tracking systems frequently output unconstrained markers: sparse, noisy, and unordered point clouds with unknown or varying configurations. To bridge the gap between corrupted raw markers and parametric human models, we introduce DirtyMoCap, a robust, marker-layout-free framework. Our core insight is to map unordered marker observations to a fixed set of "proxy anchors" comprising skeletal joints and body surface points, which serve as a stable intermediate representation. We first initialize and track these anchors over long sequences using a recurrent sliding-window architecture. Then, a custom differentiable Gauss-Newton solver fits the SMPL-H model to the tracked anchors to recover full-body pose, translation, and shape. By explicitly deriving geometric residuals, our solver learns adaptive observation confidence, smoothness, and prior weights end-to-end, adapting dynamically to the reliability of the input data. Extensive experiments on diverse, noisy marker configurations demonstrate that DirtyMoCap successfully generalizes across arbitrary layouts using only a single trained model. It consistently outperforms state-of-the-art configuration-specific baselines in both joint and vertex reconstruction accuracy, while our custom CUDA solver achieves up to a 100x speedup over standard PyTorch implementations. We further apply DirtyMoCap to heterogeneous raw optical MoCap recordings of traditional Chinese martial arts, yielding a Kung Fu motion dataset of temporally coherent SMPL-H reconstructions. Code and data are available at https://wanglongzju.github.io/DirtyMoCap-Project-Page.
Long Wang, Shuting Zhao, Shen Yan +5
Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China · Westlake University, Hangzhou, China · Fudan University, Shanghai, China +3
Recent advances in 3D human reconstruction have improved overall performance, yet current models still fail in the most challenging real-world scenarios. They often produce unstable geometry, inaccurate limb articulation and unreliable predictions under depth ambiguity or self-occlusion. A key reason is that existing datasets still lack the combination of high-resolution images, high-precision annotations and diverse whole-body motions required to support robust reconstruction. To address this gap, we present Human4K, a large-scale 4K multi-view whole-body human reconstruction dataset with mocap-accurate SMPL-X annotations. Human4K contains over six million 4K images captured by an eight-view high-resolution camera system synchronized with a professional Vicon motion capture setup, covering 11 subjects performing complex, highly articulated and strongly self-occluded full-body motions. All sequences are processed by a Motion-Retargeting and Refinement Module (MRRM) to ensure precise alignment for the full body and extremities. Experimental results show that training with Human4K consistently improves whole-body reconstruction on standard benchmarks, with particularly large gains for hands, feet and depth-ambiguous limb configurations.
Tianshun Han, Ziyu Shi, Lijian Liu +7
School of Computer Science and Engineering, the Faculty of Innovation Engineering, Macau University of Science and Technology, Macau 999078, China · State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems (MAIS), Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA), Beijing 100190, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), Beijing 100049, China +7
Existing volumetric capture of dynamic human performance achieves high fidelity with dense camera arrays. However, in real-world scenarios, only a handful of low-overlap cameras are available, which degrades the output quality and leaves large areas unobserved. Recent 4D reconstruction methods have focused on low-overlap settings, yet they still produce noticeable artifacts in under-observed regions. Video diffusion models have emerged as another option, but they show geometrically inconsistent results for humans. To address these limitations, we propose StudioRecon, a pipeline that reconstructs 4D human scenes from sparse, low-overlap cameras by decoupling background and humans. We densify background supervision by synthesizing hundreds of camera-controlled novel views with a video diffusion model. We also robustly initialize deformable Gaussian humans with cross-view identity association and triangulated multi-view keypoint fitting. Finally, our recursive enhancement module with motion-adaptive consistency injection harmonizes the composed output, thereby further avoiding remaining artifacts. We achieve state-of-the-art novel view synthesis across four real-world datasets and demonstrate applications such as novel trajectory rendering and human replacement.