# HDNet: Human Depth Estimation for Multi-Person Camera-Space Localization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.08943 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08943/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jul 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Reconstructing 3D Human Pose by Watching Humans in the Mirror](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00340/) (2021)
- [Scene-Aware 3D Multi-Human Motion Capture from a Single Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05175/) (2023)
- [Pose-Oriented Transformer with Uncertainty-Guided Refinement for 2D-to-3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07408/) (2023)
- [Monocular 3D Multi-Person Pose Estimation by Integrating Top-Down and Bottom-Up Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01797/) (2021)
- [Dual networks based 3D Multi-Person Pose Estimation from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00748/) (2022)
- [Hierarchical Graph Networks for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11927/) (2021)
- [VirtualPose: Learning Generalizable 3D Human Pose Models from Virtual Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09949/) (2022)
- [Explicit Occlusion Reasoning for Multi-person 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00090/) (2022)
- [Distribution-Aware Single-Stage Models for Multi-Person 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07697/) (2022)
- [Reconstructing Close Human Interactions from Multiple Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16173/) (2024)
- [NIMBLE: A Non-rigid Hand Model with Bones and Muscles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04533/) (2022)
- [AdaptivePose++: A Powerful Single-Stage Network for Multi-Person Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04014/) (2022)
- [Human Pose-based Estimation, Tracking and Action Recognition with Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13039/) (2023)
- [Permutation-Invariant Relational Network for Multi-person 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04913/) (2022)
- [Diverse Dance Synthesis via Keyframes with Transformer Controllers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05906/) (2022)
- [Integrated In-vehicle Monitoring System Using 3D Human Pose Estimation and Seat Belt Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07946/) (2022)
- [Mutual Adaptive Reasoning for Monocular 3D Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07900/) (2022)
- [Probabilistic 3d regression with projected huber distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05245/) (2023)
- [3D Hand Mesh Recovery from Monocular RGB in Camera Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07167/) (2024)
- [RePos: Relative-to-Absolute Pose Factorization for Cross-Environment WiFi-Based 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02986/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current works on multi-person 3D pose estimation mainly focus on the estimation of the 3D joint locations relative to the root joint and ignore the absolute locations of each pose. In this paper, we propose the Human Depth Estimation Network (HDNet), an end-to-end framework for absolute root joint localization in the camera coordinate space. Our HDNet first estimates the 2D human pose with heatmaps of the joints. These estimated heatmaps serve as attention masks for pooling features from image regions corresponding to the target person. A skeleton-based Graph Neural Network (GNN) is utilized to propagate features among joints. We formulate the target depth regression as a bin index estimation problem, which can be transformed with a soft-argmax operation from the classification output of our HDNet. We evaluate our HDNet on the root joint localization and root-relative 3D pose estimation tasks with two benchmark datasets, i.e., Human3.6M and MuPoTS-3D. The experimental results show that we outperform the previous state-of-the-art consistently under multiple evaluation metrics. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/jiahaoLjh/HumanDepth.