# Can 3D Pose be Learned from 2D Projections Alone?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.07182 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07182/

## Key facts

- Cited by 44 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [PoseAug: A Differentiable Pose Augmentation Framework for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02465/) (2021)
- [MAS: Multi-view Ancestral Sampling for 3D motion generation using 2D diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14729/) (2023)
- [ElePose: Unsupervised 3D Human Pose Estimation by Predicting Camera Elevation and Learning Normalizing Flows on 2D Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07088/) (2021)
- [Estimating Egocentric 3D Human Pose in the Wild with External Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07929/) (2022)
- [Uplift and Upsample: Efficient 3D Human Pose Estimation with Uplifting Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06110/) (2022)
- [AdaptPose: Cross-Dataset Adaptation for 3D Human Pose Estimation by Learnable Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11593/) (2021)
- [KAMA: 3D Keypoint Aware Body Mesh Articulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13502/) (2021)
- [PoseTriplet: Co-evolving 3D Human Pose Estimation, Imitation, and Hallucination under Self-supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15625/) (2022)
- [Generalizable Human Pose Triangulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00280/) (2021)
- [SelfPose3d: Self-Supervised Multi-Person Multi-View 3d Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02041/) (2024)
- [Global Adaptation meets Local Generalization: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16456/) (2023)
- [MetaPose: Fast 3D Pose from Multiple Views without 3D Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04869/) (2021)
- [In My Perspective, In My Hands: Accurate Egocentric 2D Hand Pose and Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09308/) (2024)
- [Self-Supervised 3D Human Pose Estimation with Multiple-View Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07777/) (2021)
- [On Triangulation as a Form of Self-Supervision for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15865/) (2022)
- [PAUL: Procrustean Autoencoder for Unsupervised Lifting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16773/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised 3D Human Pose Estimation from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02349/) (2023)
- [Weakly Supervised Multi-Modal 3D Human Body Pose Estimation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14889/) (2023)
- [Reconstructing Close Human Interactions from Multiple Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16173/) (2024)
- [CameraPose: Weakly-Supervised Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation by Leveraging In-the-wild 2D Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.02979/) (2023)
- [LInKs "Lifting Independent Keypoints" -- Partial Pose Lifting for Occlusion Handling with Improved Accuracy in 2D-3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07243/) (2023)
- [DensePose 3D: Lifting Canonical Surface Maps of Articulated Objects to the Third Dimension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00033/) (2021)
- [Learning Temporal 3D Human Pose Estimation with Pseudo-Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07578/) (2021)
- [Lifting 2D Human Pose to 3D with Domain Adapted 3D Body Concept](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11969/) (2021)
- [MPM: A Unified 2D-3D Human Pose Representation via Masked Pose Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17201/) (2023)
- [SVMAC: Unsupervised 3D Human Pose Estimation from a Single Image with Single-view-multi-angle Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05616/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Secondary Landmark Detection via 3D Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00543/) (2021)
- [TriPose: A Weakly-Supervised 3D Human Pose Estimation via Triangulation from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06599/) (2021)
- [Multi-person 3D pose estimation from unlabelled data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08731/) (2022)
- [Quater-GCN: Enhancing 3D Human Pose Estimation with Orientation and Semi-supervised Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19279/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D pose estimation from a single image is a challenging task in computer vision. We present a weakly supervised approach to estimate 3D pose points, given only 2D pose landmarks. Our method does not require correspondences between 2D and 3D points to build explicit 3D priors. We utilize an adversarial framework to impose a prior on the 3D structure, learned solely from their random 2D projections. Given a set of 2D pose landmarks, the generator network hypothesizes their depths to obtain a 3D skeleton. We propose a novel Random Projection layer, which randomly projects the generated 3D skeleton and sends the resulting 2D pose to the discriminator. The discriminator improves by discriminating between the generated poses and pose samples from a real distribution of 2D poses. Training does not require correspondence between the 2D inputs to either the generator or the discriminator. We apply our approach to the task of 3D human pose estimation. Results on Human3.6M dataset demonstrates that our approach outperforms many previous supervised and weakly supervised approaches.