Learning to Predict Diverse Human Motions from a Single Image via Mixture Density Networks

Human motion prediction, which plays a key role in computer vision, generally requires a past motion sequence as input. However, in real applications, a complete and correct past motion sequence can be too expensive to achieve. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to predict future human motions from a much weaker condition, i.e., a single image, with mixture density networks (MDN) modeling. Contrary to most existing deep human motion prediction approaches, the multimodal nature of MDN enables the generation of diverse future motion hypotheses, which well compensates for the strong stochastic ambiguity aggregated by the single input and human motion uncertainty. In designing the loss function, we further introduce an energy-based prior over learnable parameters of MDN to maintain motion coherence, as well as improve the prediction accuracy. Our trained model directly takes an image as input and generates multiple plausible motions that satisfy the given condition. Extensive experiments on two standard benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, in terms of prediction diversity and accuracy.