# Learning to Estimate 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Color Image

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.04092 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04092/

## Key facts

- Cited by 226 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 226)

- [Animatable Neural Radiance Fields for Modeling Dynamic Human Bodies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02872/) (2021)
- [Humans in 4D: Reconstructing and Tracking Humans with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20091/) (2023)
- [PARE: Part Attention Regressor for 3D Human Body Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08527/) (2021)
- [HuMoR: 3D Human Motion Model for Robust Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04668/) (2021)
- [Mesh Graphormer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00272/) (2021)
- [PyMAF: 3D Human Pose and Shape Regression with Pyramidal Mesh Alignment Feedback Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16507/) (2021)
- [BEHAVE: Dataset and Method for Tracking Human Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06950/) (2022)
- [BEDLAM: A Synthetic Dataset of Bodies Exhibiting Detailed Lifelike Animated Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16940/) (2023)
- [A-NeRF: Articulated Neural Radiance Fields for Learning Human Shape, Appearance, and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06199/) (2021)
- [WHAM: Reconstructing World-grounded Humans with Accurate 3D Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07531/) (2023)
- [3DGS-Avatar: Animatable Avatars via Deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09228/) (2023)
- [Ditto: Building Digital Twins of Articulated Objects from Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08227/) (2022)
- [GLAMR: Global Occlusion-Aware Human Mesh Recovery with Dynamic Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01524/) (2021)
- [PyMAF-X: Towards Well-aligned Full-body Model Regression from Monocular Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06400/) (2022)
- [Kimera: from SLAM to Spatial Perception with 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06894/) (2021)
- [SelfRecon: Self Reconstruction Your Digital Avatar from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12792/) (2022)
- [Putting People in their Place: Monocular Regression of 3D People in Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08274/) (2021)
- [Semi-Supervised 3D Hand-Object Poses Estimation with Interactions in Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05266/) (2021)
- [Collaborative Regression of Expressive Bodies using Moderation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05301/) (2021)
- [Keypoint Transformer: Solving Joint Identification in Challenging Hands and Object Interactions for Accurate 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14639/) (2021)
- [HuMMan: Multi-Modal 4D Human Dataset for Versatile Sensing and Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13686/) (2022)
- [SimPoE: Simulated Character Control for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00683/) (2021)
- [Recovering 3D Human Mesh from Monocular Images: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01923/) (2022)
- [CHORE: Contact, Human and Object REconstruction from a single RGB image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02445/) (2022)
- [Cross-Attention of Disentangled Modalities for 3D Human Mesh Recovery with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13820/) (2022)
- [Neural Monocular 3D Human Motion Capture with Physical Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01057/) (2021)
- [Playing for 3D Human Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07588/) (2021)
- [Capturing Humans in Motion: Temporal-Attentive 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08534/) (2022)
- [S3: Neural Shape, Skeleton, and Skinning Fields for 3D Human Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06571/) (2021)
- [Camera-Space Hand Mesh Recovery via Semantic Aggregation and Adaptive 2D-1D Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02845/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work addresses the problem of estimating the full body 3D human pose and shape from a single color image. This is a task where iterative optimization-based solutions have typically prevailed, while Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) have suffered because of the lack of training data and their low resolution 3D predictions. Our work aims to bridge this gap and proposes an efficient and effective direct prediction method based on ConvNets. Central part to our approach is the incorporation of a parametric statistical body shape model (SMPL) within our end-to-end framework. This allows us to get very detailed 3D mesh results, while requiring estimation only of a small number of parameters, making it friendly for direct network prediction. Interestingly, we demonstrate that these parameters can be predicted reliably only from 2D keypoints and masks. These are typical outputs of generic 2D human analysis ConvNets, allowing us to relax the massive requirement that images with 3D shape ground truth are available for training. Simultaneously, by maintaining differentiability, at training time we generate the 3D mesh from the estimated parameters and optimize explicitly for the surface using a 3D per-vertex loss. Finally, a differentiable renderer is employed to project the 3D mesh to the image, which enables further refinement of the network, by optimizing for the consistency of the projection with 2D annotations (i.e., 2D keypoints or masks). The proposed approach outperforms previous baselines on this task and offers an attractive solution for direct prediction of 3D shape from a single color image.