A Simple Method to Calculate Positions in Pose Tracking to Verify Work Procedures

Abstract

Although manufacturing processes are becoming increasingly automated, many factories still rely on manual operations. In such facilities, there is a strong need to automatically detect human errors by checking whether specified procedures are being followed. For this purpose, studies have been conducted on utilizing deep neural network (DNN) based three-dimensional (3D) human pose-tracking methods to examine work procedures. However, most of these techniques require a high-end computer equipped with a graphics processing unit (GPU). On the other hand, in this study, we adopt MediaPipe Pose, a lightweight pose estimation network provided by Google, to perform pose tracking on a low-end personal computer (PC) to enable such systems to be deployed in small factories. However, MediaPipe Pose cannot track the location of a human body because it estimates poses in a coordinate system with the waist as the origin (that is, in a root‑relative coordinate system). Therefore, in this study, we developed a method to obtain the absolute coordinates of the root with a simple calculation. The results of an experimental evaluation show that the computational load of the proposed approach is negligible, and the repeatability of the estimation sufficed to evaluate a given operator's work on a predetermined working path. Therefore, the proposed methods enables work procedures to be checked using MediaPipe Pose on a low-end PC.