HelmetPoser: A Helmet-Mounted IMU Dataset for Data-Driven Estimation of Human Head Motion in Diverse Conditions

Helmet-mounted wearable positioning systems are crucial for enhancing safety and facilitating coordination in industrial, construction, and emergency rescue environments. These systems, including LiDAR-Inertial Odometry (LIO) and Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO), often face challenges in localization due to adverse environmental conditions such as dust, smoke, and limited visual features. To address these limitations, we propose a novel head-mounted Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) dataset with ground truth, aimed at advancing data-driven IMU pose estimation. Our dataset captures human head motion patterns using a helmet-mounted system, with data from ten participants performing various activities. We explore the application of neural networks, specifically Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Transformer networks, to correct IMU biases and improve localization accuracy. Additionally, we evaluate the performance of these methods across different IMU data window dimensions, motion patterns, and sensor types. We release a publicly available dataset, demonstrate the feasibility of advanced neural network approaches for helmet-based localization, and provide evaluation metrics to establish a baseline for future studies in this field. Data and code can be found at https://lqiutong.github.io/HelmetPoser.github.io/.