Domain Knowledge-Informed Self-Supervised Representations for Workout Form Assessment

Maintaining proper form while exercising is important for preventing injuries and maximizing muscle mass gains. While fitness apps are becoming popular, they lack the functionality to detect errors in workout form. Detecting such errors naturally requires estimating users' body pose. However, off-the-shelf pose estimators struggle to perform well on the videos recorded in gym scenarios due to factors such as camera angles, occlusion from gym equipment, illumination, and clothing. To aggravate the problem, the errors to be detected in the workouts are very subtle. To that end, we propose to learn exercise-specific representations from unlabeled samples such that a small dataset annotated by experts suffices for supervised error detection. In particular, our domain knowledge-informed self-supervised approaches exploit the harmonic motion of the exercise actions, and capitalize on the large variances in camera angles, clothes, and illumination to learn powerful representations. To facilitate our self-supervised pretraining, and supervised finetuning, we curated a new exercise dataset, Fitness-AQA, comprising of three exercises: BackSquat, BarbellRow, and OverheadPress. It has been annotated by expert trainers for multiple crucial and typically occurring exercise errors. Experimental results show that our self-supervised representations outperform off-the-shelf 2D- and 3D-pose estimators and several other baselines.