GVHMR: Gravity-View Coordinates for Global Human Motion Recovery From Monocular Videos

We present a novel method for recovering world-grounded human motion from monocular video. The main challenge lies in the ambiguity of defining the world coordinate system, which varies between sequences. Previous approaches attempt to alleviate this issue by predicting relative motion in an auto-regressive manner, but are prone to accumulating errors. Instead, we propose estimating human poses in a novel Gravity-View (GV) coordinate system, which is defined by the world gravity and the camera view direction. The proposed GV system is naturally gravity-aligned and uniquely defined for each video frame, largely reducing the ambiguity of learning image-pose mapping. The estimated poses can be transformed back to the world coordinate system using camera rotations, forming a global motion sequence. Additionally, the per-frame estimation avoids error accumulation in the auto-regressive methods. Experiments on in-the-wild benchmarks demonstrate that our method recovers more realistic motion in both the camera space and world-grounded settings, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and speed. We further introduce a Stationary Label Predictor (SLP) to estimate the motion stationary states of hands and feet. By producing sharper decision boundaries, the module mitigates unnatural artifacts such as foot-sliding and shows improved performance under fast-motion inputs. The code is available at https://zju3dv.github.io/gvhmr.