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ElePose: Unsupervised 3D Human Pose Estimation by Predicting Camera Elevation and Learning Normalizing Flows on 2D Poses

14 Dec 2021CVPR 2022 1arXiv:2112.07088archive 2025-07-28

Bastian Wandt, James J. Little, Helge Rhodin

Human pose estimation from single images is a challenging problem that is typically solved by supervised learning. Unfortunately, labeled training data does not yet exist for many human activities since 3D annotation requires dedicated motion capture systems. Therefore, we propose an unsupervised approach that learns to predict a 3D human pose from a single image while only being trained with 2D pose data, which can be crowd-sourced and is already widely available. To this end, we estimate the 3D pose that is most likely over random projections, with the likelihood estimated using normalizing flows on 2D poses. While previous work requires strong priors on camera rotations in the training data set, we learn the distribution of camera angles which significantly improves the performance. Another part of our contribution is to stabilize training with normalizing flows on high-dimensional 3D pose data by first projecting the 2D poses to a linear subspace. We outperform the state-of-the-art unsupervised human pose estimation methods on the benchmark datasets Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP in many metrics.

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Code

bastianwandt/elepose mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

3D Human Pose EstimationPose EstimationUnsupervised 3D Human Pose EstimationUnsupervised Human Pose Estimation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Unsupervised 3D Human Pose Estimation Human3.6M ElePose MPJPE 64.0 #1 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Unsupervised 3D Human Pose Estimation Human3.6M ElePose PA-MPJPE 36.7 #1 of 12 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Normalizing Flows

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