Papers › PONet: Robust 3D Human Pose Estimation via Learning Orientations Only

PONet: Robust 3D Human Pose Estimation via Learning Orientations Only

21 Dec 2021arXiv:2112.11153archive 2025-07-28

Jue Wang, Shaoli Huang, Xinchao Wang, DaCheng Tao

Conventional 3D human pose estimation relies on first detecting 2D body keypoints and then solving the 2D to 3D correspondence problem.Despite the promising results, this learning paradigm is highly dependent on the quality of the 2D keypoint detector, which is inevitably fragile to occlusions and out-of-image absences.In this paper,we propose a novel Pose Orientation Net (PONet) that is able to robustly estimate 3D pose by learning orientations only, hence bypassing the error-prone keypoint detector in the absence of image evidence. For images with partially invisible limbs, PONet estimates the 3D orientation of these limbs by taking advantage of the local image evidence to recover the 3D pose.Moreover, PONet is competent to infer full 3D poses even from images with completely invisible limbs, by exploiting the orientation correlation between visible limbs to complement the estimated poses,further improving the robustness of 3D pose estimation.We evaluate our method on multiple datasets, including Human3.6M, MPII, MPI-INF-3DHP, and 3DPW. Our method achieves results on par with state-of-the-art techniques in ideal settings, yet significantly eliminates the dependency on keypoint detectors and the corresponding computation burden. In highly challenging scenarios, such as truncation and erasing, our method performs very robustly and yields much superior results as compared to state of the art,demonstrating its potential for real-world applications.

PaperPDF

Code

No code repository is listed for this paper in the archive or in Syntology's graph.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

3D Human Pose EstimationPose Estimation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
3D Human Pose Estimation 3DPW PONet PA-MPJPE 76.2 #109 of 119 Archive leaderboard report
3D Human Pose Estimation MPI-INF-3DHP PONet AUC 40.6 #78 of 108 Archive leaderboard report
3D Human Pose Estimation MPI-INF-3DHP PONet MPJPE 115.0 #78 of 108 Archive leaderboard report
3D Human Pose Estimation MPI-INF-3DHP PONet PCK 76.1 #78 of 108 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.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections