Applying Human Pose Estimation (HPE) in real world environments remains a challenging task, this paper explores and surveys real time HPE approaches and their limitations in sports analysis for individuals, alongside developing a practical lightweight prototype for real world testing and usage. The older marker-based motion capture systems evolving to the modern accessible and adaptable markerless deep learning approaches, this survey explores the foundational architectures, which balance precision and efficiency. We also compare algorithmic frameworks (top-down, bottom-up, one-stage approaches, etc.) on practical deployment metrics such as inference latency, frame rate, mean per-joint position error, and temporal jitter to guide model selection process for sports application. As our prime contribution, we are proposing a modular, lightweight software prototype, which uses MediaPipe HPE framework with multiple exercise specific logic to deliver real-time insights and AI based feedback for non-expert users. We derive sports insights and providing feedback with minimal computational resources, while showcasing the performance and reliability metrics. In the end, we suggest other future research directions like combining sensors, and AR/VR. This work caters to researchers, engineers, sport scientists, etc., as both technical resource and a valid blueprint to implement a similar or improved real-time HPE analysis system for athletic performance enhancement or other purposes.
Humanoid motion tracking is central to teleoperation and whole-body imitation, yet evaluation often disagrees with what people perceive in videos. Kinematic errors average per-frame pose differences but miss the physical artifacts that matter most, particularly unstable support and incorrect contacts such as foot skating and mistimed touch-downs. Meanwhile, widely used test suites are small and lack the diversity needed to stress contact-rich, long-horizon behaviors. We introduce HumanTracker to make humanoid tracking evaluation both perceptually aligned and scalable. The HumanTracker benchmark contains approximately 153 hours of optical motion trajectories from multiple professional performers, organized into four motion families with text labels for fine-grained diagnosis. We further propose HumanScore, a preference-aligned metric trained on 12K motion pairs containing 24K motions. Across representative state-of-the-art trackers, HumanScore better predicts human preferences and reveals contact and stability failures that kinematic metrics often miss.
High-quality dynamic human pose annotation equips AI with precise motion kinematics to enable human behavior mastery, yet remains labor-intensive and time-consuming. Current annotation tools either lack temporal correction propagation or fail in multi-person scenarios, necessitating excessive manual intervention. In this paper, we introduce IMPose, an interactive tool for multi-person dynamic pose annotation. It features a dual-level tracking mechanism that propagates one-frame multi-person pose corrections from annotators across entire videos. The keypoint-level ensures corrections temporal propagation via sequential modeling, while the instance-level employs keypoint-aware embedding with relative positional encoding to maintain multi-person cross-frame consistency. To further improve robustness, IMPose maintains historical pose and instance cues in a trajectory bank, which enhances long-range temporal association and stabilizes annotation in challenging cases such as occlusion and motion blur. By converting sparse human corrections into dense and coherent pose trajectories, our framework significantly reduces repeated manual refinement across frames. Extensive experiments show that IMPose consistently achieves a strong accuracy efficiency trade off under different interaction budgets, demonstrating particular advantages in low click annotation settings. IMPose achieves high precision annotation with high efficiency, requiring only 27 clicks per 1,050 frame video on 3DPW and 3 clicks per tracklet per 84-frame on PoseTrack21. We further expand PoseTrack21 with 188K pose instances (3.55M keypoints) at a minimal cost of 10 annotators in 10 hours. The annotation tool, codes, and extended dataset will be open-sourced.
The rapid advances in deep learning have significantly enhanced the accuracy of multimodal 3D human pose estimation (HPE). However, the state-of-the-art (SOTA) HPE pipelines still rely on Transformers, whose quadratic complexity makes real-time processing for long sequences impractical. Mamba addresses this issue through selective state-space modeling, enabling efficient sequence processing without sacrificing representational power. Nevertheless, it struggles to capture complex spatial dependencies in multimodal settings. To bridge this gap, we propose VIMCAN, a hybrid architecture that combines the efficient sequence modeling of Mamba with the spatial reasoning of Cross-Attention, and performs robust visual-inertial fusion and human pose estimation between RGB keypoints and wearable IMU data. By leveraging Mamba's dynamic parameterization for temporal modeling and Attention for spatial dependency extraction, VIMCAN achieves superior accuracy, with mean per-joint position errors (MPJPE) of 17.2 mm on TotalCapture and 45.3 mm on 3DPW. VIMCAN outperforms prior Transformer-based and other SOTA approaches while supporting real-time inference at over 60 frames per second on consumer-grade hardware. The source code is available at \href{https://github.com/Eddieyzp/VIMCAN}{this GitHub repository}.