Paper Detail

Seeing Without Eyes: 4D Human-Scene Understanding from Wearable IMUs

Hao-Yu Hsu, Tianhang Cheng, Jing Wen, Alexander G. Schwing, Shenlong Wang

arxiv Score 5.3

Published 2026-04-23 · First seen 2026-04-24

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Abstract

Understanding human activities and their surrounding environments typically relies on visual perception, yet cameras pose persistent challenges in privacy, safety, energy efficiency, and scalability. We explore an alternative: 4D perception without vision. Its goal is to reconstruct human motion and 3D scene layouts purely from everyday wearable sensors. For this we introduce IMU-to-4D, a framework that repurposes large language models for non-visual spatiotemporal understanding of human-scene dynamics. IMU-to-4D uses data from a few inertial sensors from earbuds, watches, or smartphones and predicts detailed 4D human motion together with coarse scene structure. Experiments across diverse human-scene datasets show that IMU-to-4D yields more coherent and temporally stable results than SoTA cascaded pipelines, suggesting wearable motion sensors alone can support rich 4D understanding.

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BibTeX

@article{hsu2026seeing,
  title = {Seeing Without Eyes: 4D Human-Scene Understanding from Wearable IMUs},
  author = {Hao-Yu Hsu and Tianhang Cheng and Jing Wen and Alexander G. Schwing and Shenlong Wang},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Understanding human activities and their surrounding environments typically relies on visual perception, yet cameras pose persistent challenges in privacy, safety, energy efficiency, and scalability. We explore an alternative: 4D perception without vision. Its goal is to reconstruct human motion and 3D scene layouts purely from everyday wearable sensors. For this we introduce IMU-to-4D, a framework that repurposes large language models for non-visual spatiotemporal understanding of human-scene d},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21926},
  keywords = {cs.CV},
  eprint = {2604.21926},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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