Papers › Robust Estimation of 3D Human Poses from a Single Image

Robust Estimation of 3D Human Poses from a Single Image

9 Jun 2014CVPR 2014 6arXiv:1406.2282archive 2025-07-28

Chunyu Wang, Yizhou Wang, Zhouchen Lin, Alan L. Yuille, Wen Gao

Human pose estimation is a key step to action recognition. We propose a method of estimating 3D human poses from a single image, which works in conjunction with an existing 2D pose/joint detector. 3D pose estimation is challenging because multiple 3D poses may correspond to the same 2D pose after projection due to the lack of depth information. Moreover, current 2D pose estimators are usually inaccurate which may cause errors in the 3D estimation. We address the challenges in three ways: (i) We represent a 3D pose as a linear combination of a sparse set of bases learned from 3D human skeletons. (ii) We enforce limb length constraints to eliminate anthropomorphically implausible skeletons. (iii) We estimate a 3D pose by minimizing the L₁-norm error between the projection of the 3D pose and the corresponding 2D detection. The L₁-norm loss term is robust to inaccurate 2D joint estimations. We use the alternating direction method (ADM) to solve the optimization problem efficiently. Our approach outperforms the state-of-the-arts on three benchmark datasets.

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Tasks

3D Human Pose Estimation3D Pose EstimationAction RecognitionPose EstimationTemporal Action Localization

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
3D Human Pose Estimation HumanEva-I Wang et al. Mean Reconstruction Error (mm) 71.3 #29 of 31 Archive leaderboard report

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