mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields

arXiv 1812.08008 ↗First posted 18 Dec 2018cs.CVcited by 1,161

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Cited by 76 in Diffusion models, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

Realtime multi-person 2D pose estimation is a key component in enabling machines to have an understanding of people in images and videos. In this work, we present a realtime approach to detect the 2D pose of multiple people in an image. The proposed method uses a nonparametric representation, which we refer to as Part Affinity Fields (PAFs), to learn to associate body parts with individuals in the image. This bottom-up system achieves high accuracy and realtime performance, regardless of the number of people in the image. In previous work, PAFs and body part location estimation were refined simultaneously across training stages. We demonstrate that a PAF-only refinement rather than both PAF and body part location refinement results in a substantial increase in both runtime performance and accuracy. We also present the first combined body and foot keypoint detector, based on an internal annotated foot dataset that we have publicly released. We show that the combined detector not only reduces the inference time compared to running them sequentially, but also maintains the accuracy of each component individually. This work has culminated in the release of OpenPose, the first open-source realtime system for multi-person 2D pose detection, including body, foot, hand, and facial keypoints.

Key facts. Cited by 1,161 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 18 Dec 2018.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 233; 2022: 232; 2023: 219; 2024: 183; 2025: 165; 2026: 129.

1,161 papers.

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  1. 2023Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 5,466
  2. 2023T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 1,339
  3. 2021AI Choreographer: Music Conditioned 3D Dance Generation with AIST++cited by 479
  4. 2025VACE: All-in-One Video Creation and Editingcited by 467
  5. 2021Animatable Neural Radiance Fields for Modeling Dynamic Human Bodiescited by 361
  6. 2022DiffusionDet: Diffusion Model for Object Detectioncited by 354
  7. 2021HuMoR: 3D Human Motion Model for Robust Pose Estimationcited by 319
  8. 2023Effective Whole-body Pose Estimation with Two-stages Distillationcited by 307
  9. 2021VITON-HD: High-Resolution Virtual Try-On via Misalignment-Aware Normalizationcited by 287
  10. 2021Revisiting Skeleton-based Action Recognitioncited by 256
  11. 2021H2O: Two Hands Manipulating Objects for First Person Interaction Recognitioncited by 251
  12. 2021PyMAF: 3D Human Pose and Shape Regression with Pyramidal Mesh Alignment Feedback Loopcited by 250
38 more
  1. 2021A-NeRF: Articulated Neural Radiance Fields for Learning Human Shape, Appearance, and Posecited by 233
  2. 2024Sapiens: Foundation for Human Vision Modelscited by 229
  3. 2021AGORA: Avatars in Geography Optimized for Regression Analysiscited by 203
  4. 2023WHAM: Reconstructing World-grounded Humans with Accurate 3D Motioncited by 200
  5. 2022AlphaPose: Whole-Body Regional Multi-Person Pose Estimation and Tracking in Real-Timecited by 199
  6. 2022BEAT: A Large-Scale Semantic and Emotional Multi-Modal Dataset for Conversational Gestures Synthesiscited by 177
  7. 2022Capturing and Inferring Dense Full-Body Human-Scene Contactcited by 176
  8. 2021ARCH++: Animation-Ready Clothed Human Reconstruction Revisitedcited by 174
  9. 2022Latent Image Animator: Learning to Animate Images via Latent Space Navigationcited by 172
  10. 2023RTMPose: Real-Time Multi-Person Pose Estimation based on MMPosecited by 170
  11. 2021FrankMocap: A Monocular 3D Whole-Body Pose Estimation System via Regression and Integrationcited by 168
  12. 2023DreamPose: Fashion Image-to-Video Synthesis via Stable Diffusioncited by 167
  13. 2021Probabilistic Modeling for Human Mesh Recoverycited by 152
  14. 2022PyMAF-X: Towards Well-aligned Full-body Model Regression from Monocular Imagescited by 152
  15. 2024OOTDiffusion: Outfitting Fusion based Latent Diffusion for Controllable Virtual Try-oncited by 150
  16. 2021Collaborative Regression of Expressive Bodies using Moderationcited by 137
  17. 2021EgoBody: Human Body Shape and Motion of Interacting People from Head-Mounted Devicescited by 136
  18. 2023Vid2Avatar: 3D Avatar Reconstruction from Videos in the Wild via Self-supervised Scene Decompositioncited by 134
  19. 2023Taming Diffusion Models for Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generationcited by 128
  20. 2023One-Stage 3D Whole-Body Mesh Recovery with Component Aware Transformercited by 128
  21. 2023GP-VTON: Towards General Purpose Virtual Try-on via Collaborative Local-Flow Global-Parsing Learningcited by 120
  22. 2023Drivable 3D Gaussian Avatarscited by 120
  23. 2021LASR: Learning Articulated Shape Reconstruction from a Monocular Videocited by 115
  24. 2023MagicPose: Realistic Human Poses and Facial Expressions Retargeting with Identity-aware Diffusioncited by 115
  25. 2022Gait Recognition in the Wild with Dense 3D Representations and A Benchmarkcited by 113
  26. 2022Learning Hierarchical Cross-Modal Association for Co-Speech Gesture Generationcited by 106
  27. 20213D Human Action Representation Learning via Cross-View Consistency Pursuitcited by 105
  28. 2022Recovering 3D Human Mesh from Monocular Images: A Surveycited by 103
  29. 2022VideoDex: Learning Dexterity from Internet Videoscited by 101
  30. 2023EMAGE: Towards Unified Holistic Co-Speech Gesture Generation via Expressive Masked Audio Gesture Modelingcited by 101
  31. 20233D Human Pose Estimation via Intuitive Physicscited by 100
  32. 2022Not All Tokens Are Equal: Human-centric Visual Analysis via Token Clustering Transformercited by 99
  33. 2021Learning Motion Priors for 4D Human Body Capture in 3D Scenescited by 98
  34. 2023EMDB: The Electromagnetic Database of Global 3D Human Pose and Shape in the Wildcited by 95
  35. 2024TokenHMR: Advancing Human Mesh Recovery with a Tokenized Pose Representationcited by 93
  36. 2025Controllable Video Generation: A Surveycited by 93
  37. 2022InterCap: Joint Markerless 3D Tracking of Humans and Objects in Interactioncited by 90
  38. 2021NPMs: Neural Parametric Models for 3D Deformable Shapescited by 89

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