# VNect: Real-time 3D Human Pose Estimation with a Single RGB Camera

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.01583 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01583/

## Key facts

- Cited by 129 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 May 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 129)

- [3D Human Pose Estimation with Spatial and Temporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10455/) (2021)
- [A-NeRF: Articulated Neural Radiance Fields for Learning Human Shape, Appearance, and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06199/) (2021)
- [FrankMocap: A Monocular 3D Whole-Body Pose Estimation System via Regression and Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06428/) (2021)
- [MixSTE: Seq2seq Mixed Spatio-Temporal Encoder for 3D Human Pose Estimation in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00859/) (2022)
- [GLAMR: Global Occlusion-Aware Human Mesh Recovery with Dynamic Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01524/) (2021)
- [Putting People in their Place: Monocular Regression of 3D People in Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08274/) (2021)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation via Intuitive Physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18246/) (2023)
- [EMDB: The Electromagnetic Database of Global 3D Human Pose and Shape in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16894/) (2023)
- [Ego-Body Pose Estimation via Ego-Head Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04636/) (2022)
- [InterCap: Joint Markerless 3D Tracking of Humans and Objects in Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12354/) (2022)
- [PoseFormerV2: Exploring Frequency Domain for Efficient and Robust 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17472/) (2023)
- [PoseAug: A Differentiable Pose Augmentation Framework for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02465/) (2021)
- [RelPose++: Recovering 6D Poses from Sparse-view Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04926/) (2023)
- [P-STMO: Pre-Trained Spatial Temporal Many-to-One Model for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07628/) (2022)
- [Neural Monocular 3D Human Motion Capture with Physical Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01057/) (2021)
- [Direct Multi-view Multi-person 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04076/) (2021)
- [SmoothNet: A Plug-and-Play Network for Refining Human Poses in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13715/) (2021)
- [MotionAGFormer: Enhancing 3D Human Pose Estimation with a Transformer-GCNFormer Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16288/) (2023)
- [Learning Skeletal Graph Neural Networks for Hard 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07181/) (2021)
- [Subdivision-Based Mesh Convolution Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02285/) (2021)
- [GFPose: Learning 3D Human Pose Prior with Gradient Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08641/) (2022)
- [Online Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02092/) (2021)
- [IMUPoser: Full-Body Pose Estimation using IMUs in Phones, Watches, and Earbuds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12518/) (2023)
- [DECO: Dense Estimation of 3D Human-Scene Contact In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15273/) (2023)
- [Conditional Directed Graph Convolution for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07797/) (2021)
- [THUNDR: Transformer-based 3D HUmaN Reconstruction with Markers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09336/) (2021)
- [Body Meshes as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02467/) (2021)
- [Imitation Learning for Human Pose Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03449/) (2019)
- [NeuralHumanFVV: Real-Time Neural Volumetric Human Performance Rendering using RGB Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07700/) (2021)
- [Differentiable Dynamics for Articulated 3d Human Motion Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12256/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present the first real-time method to capture the full global 3D skeletal pose of a human in a stable, temporally consistent manner using a single RGB camera. Our method combines a new convolutional neural network (CNN) based pose regressor with kinematic skeleton fitting. Our novel fully-convolutional pose formulation regresses 2D and 3D joint positions jointly in real time and does not require tightly cropped input frames. A real-time kinematic skeleton fitting method uses the CNN output to yield temporally stable 3D global pose reconstructions on the basis of a coherent kinematic skeleton. This makes our approach the first monocular RGB method usable in real-time applications such as 3D character control---thus far, the only monocular methods for such applications employed specialized RGB-D cameras. Our method's accuracy is quantitatively on par with the best offline 3D monocular RGB pose estimation methods. Our results are qualitatively comparable to, and sometimes better than, results from monocular RGB-D approaches, such as the Kinect. However, we show that our approach is more broadly applicable than RGB-D solutions, i.e. it works for outdoor scenes, community videos, and low quality commodity RGB cameras.