Phase-Separated Complex Hilbert PCA on Markerless 3D Pose Estimation Data: A Global Phase Network and Its Extension to a Continuous Field on the Body Surface
For sports biomechanics researchers, it provides a unified framework for whole-body coordination analysis from markerless pose data, but the results are limited to a single subject and specific motion, making the contribution incremental.
The paper applies Complex Hilbert PCA to markerless 3D pose data from hammer-throwing trials, extracting a whole-body phase pattern that reveals a trunk-anchored global phase architecture and functional asymmetry between backswing and downswing (Mode-1 contribution 45.5% vs. 70.5%, inter-trial consistency 0.38 vs. 0.58). The method extends to a continuous phase field on 1,079 body-surface mesh vertices, and shows strong correlation with kinetic energy mobilization in the downswing (ρ≈0.71).
Quantitative analysis of the kinematic chain in sports motion is essential for performance evaluation and injury prevention. Conventional methods such as the kinematic-sequence (KS) and continuous relative phase (CRP) are confined to adjacent joint pairs and lack a unified framework for whole-body coordination, while segmental power-flow analysis requires force plates and inertial parameters that restrict it to laboratory environments. We apply Complex Hilbert Principal Component Analysis (CHPCA) separately to each motion phase (backswing and downswing) on markerless 3D pose estimation data, extracting the dominant whole-body phase pattern as a single complex eigenvector. The pipeline further includes a fully automatic signal-based phase segmentation (no priors on strike count or rest location) and an extension to 1,079 body-surface mesh vertices, so that the kinematic chain is represented as a continuous phase field across the body. On 14 hammer-striking trials of a single subject, the framework reveals (i) a trunk-anchored global phase architecture, (ii) a functional asymmetry between preparation and execution phases quantified by Mode-1 contribution (45.5% vs. 70.5%) and inter-trial Spearman consistency (0.38 vs. 0.58), and (iii) a consistent reorganisation across both skeletal joints and mesh vertices ($p < 10^{-10}$ on 1,079 vertices). As a methodological consistency check, pairwise phase differences from the Mode-1 eigenvector are compared against CRP on all 190 joint pairs by a permutation test ($ρ= 0.473$, $p = 0.0005$). A correspondence analysis between Mode-1 amplitude and kinetic-energy mobilisation variance further shows a strong positive correlation in the downswing ($ρ\approx 0.71$ on both skeleton and mesh) and no correlation in the backswing, indicating that the proposed framework bridges kinematic and kinetic descriptions of coordination through phase structure.