| ## MINIONS: Motion capture from INertial and visION Sensors |
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| MINIONS is a large-scale multi-modal human motion capture dataset collected from **inertial sensors (IMUs)** and **vision sensors (RGB videos)**, designed to support research on consumer-affordable motion capture with a monocular camera and sparse IMUs, as well as broader motion understanding tasks. |
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| ### Key properties |
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| - **Multi-modalities**: captured with up to **eight 2K RGB cameras** and **full-body IMU suits with 17 nine-axis sensors**; an **RGB-D scanner** is used to obtain textured meshes for each actor. |
| - **Scalability**: **5.5M+ frames** and **~440 minutes** of action sequences captured from multiple viewpoints. |
| - **Diversity**: **146** fine-grained action categories, including **single-person** and **multi-person interactions**. |
| - **Abundance of annotations**: time-synchronized labels per frame, including **2D/3D keypoints**, **joint rotations**, **SMPL parameters**, **fine-grained action labels**, and **texture**. |
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| ### Data acquisition & annotation pipeline (from the paper) |
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| The dataset construction covers the following stages: |
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| - **Multimedia hardware setup**: synchronized RGB cameras, full-body IMUs, and an RGB-D scanner. |
| - **Calibration**: camera calibration; IMU alignment to the SMPL coordinate system; camera–IMU alignment. |
| - **Textured mesh reconstruction**: RGB-D scanning to build textured human models and recover approximate SMPL shape parameters. |
| - **Global motion annotations**: tracking, 2D keypoint detection, 3D triangulation, and motion recovery by combining visual and inertial results, producing high-quality 2D/3D joints and SMPL parameters. |
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| ### Access policy (controlled access) |
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| The dataset is **not released for indiscriminate public download**. Access is **registration-based and approval-based** for eligible users, and requires submitting information and a **signed agreement**. |
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| - **Data License**: see `LICENSE` (full text). |
| - **Important**: the license grants use **solely for non-commercial, not-for-profit research and/or non-commercial educational use** (see the license for full terms). |
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| ### Citation |
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| If you use MINIONS, please cite the corresponding paper: |
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| - **Title**: *Motion Capture from Inertial and Vision Sensors* |
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| ```bibtex |
| @article{minions2026, |
| title = {Motion Capture from Inertial and Vision Sensors}, |
| author = {Chen, Xiaodong and Liu, Wu and Bao, Qian and Liu, Xinchen and Dai, Ruoli and Zhang, Yongdong and Mei, Tao}, |
| journal = {Arxiv}, |
| year = {2026} |
| } |
| ``` |
