# Ordinal Depth Supervision for 3D Human Pose Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.04095 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04095/

## Key facts

- Cited by 107 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 107)

- [3D Human Pose Estimation with Spatial and Temporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10455/) (2021)
- [MotionBERT: A Unified Perspective on Learning Human Motion Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06551/) (2022)
- [MixSTE: Seq2seq Mixed Spatio-Temporal Encoder for 3D Human Pose Estimation in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00859/) (2022)
- [NeuralLift-360: Lifting An In-the-wild 2D Photo to A 3D Object with 360deg Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16431/) (2022)
- [Putting People in their Place: Monocular Regression of 3D People in Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08274/) (2021)
- [Graph Stacked Hourglass Networks for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16385/) (2021)
- [Exploiting Temporal Contexts with Strided Transformer for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14304/) (2021)
- [PoseFormerV2: Exploring Frequency Domain for Efficient and Robust 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17472/) (2023)
- [On Self-Contact and Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03176/) (2021)
- [P-STMO: Pre-Trained Spatial Temporal Many-to-One Model for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07628/) (2022)
- [Human-Art: A Versatile Human-Centric Dataset Bridging Natural and Artificial Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02760/) (2023)
- [MotionAGFormer: Enhancing 3D Human Pose Estimation with a Transformer-GCNFormer Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16288/) (2023)
- [MoDGS: Dynamic Gaussian Splatting from Casually-captured Monocular Videos with Depth Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00434/) (2024)
- [Recent Advances in Monocular 2D and 3D Human Pose Estimation: A Deep Learning Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11536/) (2021)
- [gSDF: Geometry-Driven Signed Distance Functions for 3D Hand-Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11970/) (2023)
- [Reconstructing 3D Human Pose by Watching Humans in the Mirror](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00340/) (2021)
- [GLA-GCN: Global-local Adaptive Graph Convolutional Network for 3D Human Pose Estimation from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05853/) (2023)
- [Body Meshes as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02467/) (2021)
- [Multi-modal 3D Human Pose Estimation with 2D Weak Supervision in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12141/) (2021)
- [Learning to Regress Bodies from Images using Differentiable Semantic Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03480/) (2021)
- [Graph-Based 3D Multi-Person Pose Estimation Using Multi-View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05885/) (2021)
- [Context Modeling in 3D Human Pose Estimation: A Unified Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15507/) (2021)
- [ElePose: Unsupervised 3D Human Pose Estimation by Predicting Camera Elevation and Learning Normalizing Flows on 2D Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07088/) (2021)
- [KTPFormer: Kinematics and Trajectory Prior Knowledge-Enhanced Transformer for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00658/) (2024)
- [KAMA: 3D Keypoint Aware Body Mesh Articulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13502/) (2021)
- [PC-HMR: Pose Calibration for 3D Human Mesh Recovery from 2D Images/Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09009/) (2021)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Adaptation for Self-Supervised 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15293/) (2022)
- [BodySLAM: Joint Camera Localisation, Mapping, and Human Motion Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02301/) (2022)
- [MotionScript: Natural Language Descriptions for Expressive 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12634/) (2023)
- [Pose-Oriented Transformer with Uncertainty-Guided Refinement for 2D-to-3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07408/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Our ability to train end-to-end systems for 3D human pose estimation from single images is currently constrained by the limited availability of 3D annotations for natural images. Most datasets are captured using Motion Capture (MoCap) systems in a studio setting and it is difficult to reach the variability of 2D human pose datasets, like MPII or LSP. To alleviate the need for accurate 3D ground truth, we propose to use a weaker supervision signal provided by the ordinal depths of human joints. This information can be acquired by human annotators for a wide range of images and poses. We showcase the effectiveness and flexibility of training Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) with these ordinal relations in different settings, always achieving competitive performance with ConvNets trained with accurate 3D joint coordinates. Additionally, to demonstrate the potential of the approach, we augment the popular LSP and MPII datasets with ordinal depth annotations. This extension allows us to present quantitative and qualitative evaluation in non-studio conditions. Simultaneously, these ordinal annotations can be easily incorporated in the training procedure of typical ConvNets for 3D human pose. Through this inclusion we achieve new state-of-the-art performance for the relevant benchmarks and validate the effectiveness of ordinal depth supervision for 3D human pose.