mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image

arXiv 1607.08128 ↗First posted 27 Jul 2016cs.CVcited by 692

Not on the map. Why?

Cited by 37 in Diffusion models, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

We describe the first method to automatically estimate the 3D pose of the human body as well as its 3D shape from a single unconstrained image. We estimate a full 3D mesh and show that 2D joints alone carry a surprising amount of information about body shape. The problem is challenging because of the complexity of the human body, articulation, occlusion, clothing, lighting, and the inherent ambiguity in inferring 3D from 2D. To solve this, we first use a recently published CNN-based method, DeepCut, to predict (bottom-up) the 2D body joint locations. We then fit (top-down) a recently published statistical body shape model, called SMPL, to the 2D joints. We do so by minimizing an objective function that penalizes the error between the projected 3D model joints and detected 2D joints. Because SMPL captures correlations in human shape across the population, we are able to robustly fit it to very little data. We further leverage the 3D model to prevent solutions that cause interpenetration. We evaluate our method, SMPLify, on the Leeds Sports, HumanEva, and Human3.6M datasets, showing superior pose accuracy with respect to the state of the art.

Key facts. Cited by 692 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 27 Jul 2016.

Builds on

No reference list yet.

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 133; 2022: 115; 2023: 136; 2024: 132; 2025: 100; 2026: 76.

692 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2023LRM: Large Reconstruction Model for Single Image to 3Dcited by 834
  2. 2023Humans in 4D: Reconstructing and Tracking Humans with Transformerscited by 344
  3. 2021PARE: Part Attention Regressor for 3D Human Body Estimationcited by 334
  4. 2021HuMoR: 3D Human Motion Model for Robust Pose Estimationcited by 319
  5. 2021ICON: Implicit Clothed humans Obtained from Normalscited by 283
  6. 2021PyMAF: 3D Human Pose and Shape Regression with Pyramidal Mesh Alignment Feedback Loopcited by 250
  7. 2022BEHAVE: Dataset and Method for Tracking Human Object Interactionscited by 246
  8. 2022CLIFF: Carrying Location Information in Full Frames into Human Pose and Shape Estimationcited by 237
  9. 2021A-NeRF: Articulated Neural Radiance Fields for Learning Human Shape, Appearance, and Posecited by 233
  10. 2023Motion-X: A Large-scale 3D Expressive Whole-body Human Motion Datasetcited by 220
  11. 2023InterGen: Diffusion-based Multi-human Motion Generation under Complex Interactionscited by 205
  12. 2023WHAM: Reconstructing World-grounded Humans with Accurate 3D Motioncited by 200
38 more
  1. 2022Monocular Dynamic View Synthesis: A Reality Checkcited by 199
  2. 2023Perpetual Humanoid Control for Real-time Simulated Avatarscited by 198
  3. 2022MotionBERT: A Unified Perspective on Learning Human Motion Representationscited by 188
  4. 2021SCANimate: Weakly Supervised Learning of Skinned Clothed Avatar Networkscited by 181
  5. 2022Generating Holistic 3D Human Motion from Speechcited by 180
  6. 2022Embodied Hands: Modeling and Capturing Hands and Bodies Togethercited by 179
  7. 2024MoSca: Dynamic Gaussian Fusion from Casual Videos via 4D Motion Scaffoldscited by 177
  8. 2022Capturing and Inferring Dense Full-Body Human-Scene Contactcited by 176
  9. 2021ARCH++: Animation-Ready Clothed Human Reconstruction Revisitedcited by 174
  10. 2021FrankMocap: A Monocular 3D Whole-Body Pose Estimation System via Regression and Integrationcited by 168
  11. 2021SMPLicit: Topology-aware Generative Model for Clothed Peoplecited by 154
  12. 2023DreamAvatar: Text-and-Shape Guided 3D Human Avatar Generation via Diffusion Modelscited by 154
  13. 2023SMPLer-X: Scaling Up Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimationcited by 154
  14. 2021Probabilistic Modeling for Human Mesh Recoverycited by 152
  15. 2022PyMAF-X: Towards Well-aligned Full-body Model Regression from Monocular Imagescited by 152
  16. 2021GLAMR: Global Occlusion-Aware Human Mesh Recovery with Dynamic Camerascited by 151
  17. 2021Kimera: from SLAM to Spatial Perception with 3D Dynamic Scene Graphscited by 144
  18. 2022SelfRecon: Self Reconstruction Your Digital Avatar from Monocular Videocited by 144
  19. 2021Putting People in their Place: Monocular Regression of 3D People in Depthcited by 141
  20. 2023Decoupling Human and Camera Motion from Videos in the Wildcited by 140
  21. 2022InstantAvatar: Learning Avatars from Monocular Video in 60 Secondscited by 138
  22. 2021Collaborative Regression of Expressive Bodies using Moderationcited by 137
  23. 2021EgoBody: Human Body Shape and Motion of Interacting People from Head-Mounted Devicescited by 136
  24. 2021SPEC: Seeing People in the Wild with an Estimated Cameracited by 134
  25. 2024World-Grounded Human Motion Recovery via Gravity-View Coordinatescited by 127
  26. 2021LASR: Learning Articulated Shape Reconstruction from a Monocular Videocited by 115
  27. 2022HuMMan: Multi-Modal 4D Human Dataset for Versatile Sensing and Modelingcited by 115
  28. 2021A-SDF: Learning Disentangled Signed Distance Functions for Articulated Shape Representationcited by 113
  29. 2021SimPoE: Simulated Character Control for 3D Human Pose Estimationcited by 111
  30. 2024TRAM: Global Trajectory and Motion of 3D Humans from in-the-wild Videoscited by 105
  31. 2022Recovering 3D Human Mesh from Monocular Images: A Surveycited by 103
  32. 2021Neural-GIF: Neural Generalized Implicit Functions for Animating People in Clothingcited by 102
  33. 2021Dynamics-Regulated Kinematic Policy for Egocentric Pose Estimationcited by 101
  34. 20233D Human Pose Estimation via Intuitive Physicscited by 100
  35. 2022CHORE: Contact, Human and Object REconstruction from a single RGB imagecited by 95
  36. 2023EMDB: The Electromagnetic Database of Global 3D Human Pose and Shape in the Wildcited by 95
  37. 2024TokenHMR: Advancing Human Mesh Recovery with a Tokenized Pose Representationcited by 93
  38. 2022InterCap: Joint Markerless 3D Tracking of Humans and Objects in Interactioncited by 90

50 most cited of 692 All 692 (JSON)