  We propose a new architecture for the learning of predictive spatio-temporal
motion models from data alone. Our approach, dubbed the Dropout Autoencoder
LSTM, is capable of synthesizing natural looking motion sequences over long
time horizons without catastrophic drift or motion degradation. The model
consists of two components, a 3-layer recurrent neural network to model
temporal aspects and a novel auto-encoder that is trained to implicitly recover
the spatial structure of the human skeleton via randomly removing information
about joints during training time. This Dropout Autoencoder (D-AE) is then used
to filter each predicted pose of the LSTM, reducing accumulation of error and
hence drift over time. Furthermore, we propose new evaluation protocols to
assess the quality of synthetic motion sequences even for which no ground truth
data exists. The proposed protocols can be used to assess generated sequences
of arbitrary length. Finally, we evaluate our proposed method on two of the
largest motion-capture datasets available to date and show that our model
outperforms the state-of-the-art on a variety of actions, including cyclic and
acyclic motion, and that it can produce natural looking sequences over longer
time horizons than previous methods.
