Physics‐Based Motion Tracking of Contact‐Rich Interacting Characters

Abstract Motion tracking has been an important technique for imitating human‐like movement from large‐scale datasets in physics‐based motion synthesis. However, existing approaches focus on tracking either single character or a particular type of interaction, limiting their ability to handle contact‐rich interactions. Extending single‐character tracking approaches suffers from the instability due to the challenge of forces transferred through contacts. Contact‐rich interactions requires levels of control, which places much greater demands on model capacity. To this end, we propose a robust tracking method based on progressive neural network (PNN) where multiple experts are specialized in learning skills of various difficulties. Our method learns to assign training samples to experts automatically without requiring manually scheduling. Both qualitative and quantitative results show that our method delivers more stable motion tracking in densely interactive movements while enabling more efficient model training.

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Publication Details

Journal
Computer Graphics Forum
Published
2026-03-27
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.70336
Primary Topic
Human Motion and Animation
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

Physics‐Based Motion Tracking of Contact‐Rich Interacting Characters

Qianhui Men, Hubert P. H. Shum, Xiaotang Zhang, Ziyi Chang
Computer Graphics Forum
Human Motion and Animation
article

Physics‐Based Motion Tracking of Contact‐Rich Interacting Characters

Qianhui Men, Hubert P. H. Shum, Xiaotang Zhang, Ziyi Chang
article en

Abstract

Abstract Motion tracking has been an important technique for imitating human‐like movement from large‐scale datasets in physics‐based motion synthesis. However, existing approaches focus on tracking either single character or a particular type of interaction, limiting their ability to handle contact‐rich interactions. Extending single‐character tracking approaches suffers from the instability due to the challenge of forces transferred through contacts. Contact‐rich interactions requires levels of control, which places much greater demands on model capacity. To this end, we propose a robust tracking method based on progressive neural network (PNN) where multiple experts are specialized in learning skills of various difficulties. Our method learns to assign training samples to experts automatically without requiring manually scheduling. Both qualitative and quantitative results show that our method delivers more stable motion tracking in densely interactive movements while enabling more efficient model training.

Computer Graphics Forum
Durham University (GB), University of Bristol (GB)
Openalex Percentile: Top 5%
Human Motion and Animation
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