MODA: Motion-Drift Augmentation for Inertial Human Motion Analysis

While data augmentation (DA) has been extensively studied in computer vision, its application to Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) signals remains largely unexplored, despite IMUs’ growing importance in human motion analysis. In this paper, we present the first systematic study of IMU-specific data augmentation, beginning with a comprehensive analysis that identifies three fundamental properties of IMU signals: their time-series nature, inherent multimodality (rotation and acceleration) and motion-consistency characteristics. Through this analysis, we demonstrate the limitations of applying conventional time-series augmentation techniques to IMU data. We then introduce Motion-Drift Augmentation (MODA), a novel technique that simulates the natural displacement of body-worn IMUs during motion. We evaluate our approach across five diverse datasets and five deep learning settings, including i) fully-supervised, ii) semi-supervised, iii) domain adaptation, iv) domain generalization and v) few-shot learning for both Human Action Recognition (HAR) and Human Pose Estimation (HPE) tasks. Experimental results show that our proposed MODA consistently outperforms existing augmentation methods, with semi-supervised learning performance approaching state-of-the-art fully-supervised methods.