Deep Learning-Based Human Pose Estimation: A Survey
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Abstract (arXiv)
Human pose estimation aims to locate the human body parts and build human body representation (e.g., body skeleton) from input data such as images and videos. It has drawn increasing attention during the past decade and has been utilized in a wide range of applications including human-computer interaction, motion analysis, augmented reality, and virtual reality. Although the recently developed deep learning-based solutions have achieved high performance in human pose estimation, there still remain challenges due to insufficient training data, depth ambiguities, and occlusion. The goal of this survey paper is to provide a comprehensive review of recent deep learning-based solutions for both 2D and 3D pose estimation via a systematic analysis and comparison of these solutions based on their input data and inference procedures. More than 250 research papers since 2014 are covered in this survey. Furthermore, 2D and 3D human pose estimation datasets and evaluation metrics are included. Quantitative performance comparisons of the reviewed methods on popular datasets are summarized and discussed. Finally, the challenges involved, applications, and future research directions are concluded. A regularly updated project page is provided: urlhttps://github.com/zczcwh/DL-HPE
Key facts. Cited by 205 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 24 Dec 2020.
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Citing papers per year: 2021: 7; 2022: 29; 2023: 35; 2024: 52; 2025: 49; 2026: 33.
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- 2022Capturing and Inferring Dense Full-Body Human-Scene Contactcited by 176
- 2022Recovering 3D Human Mesh from Monocular Images: A Surveycited by 103
- 20233D Human Pose Estimation via Intuitive Physicscited by 100
- 2023Beyond Appearance: a Semantic Controllable Self-Supervised Learning Framework for Human-Centric Visual Taskscited by 94
- 2023PoseFormerV2: Exploring Frequency Domain for Efficient and Robust 3D Human Pose Estimationcited by 91
- 2022PoseGPT: Quantization-based 3D Human Motion Generation and Forecastingcited by 78
- 2023SynBody: Synthetic Dataset with Layered Human Models for 3D Human Perception and Modelingcited by 54
- 2022Learning 3D Human Pose Estimation from Dozens of Datasets using a Geometry-Aware Autoencoder to Bridge Between Skeleton Formatscited by 50
- 2023GLA-GCN: Global-local Adaptive Graph Convolutional Network for 3D Human Pose Estimation from Monocular Videocited by 46
- 2021Multi-modal 3D Human Pose Estimation with 2D Weak Supervision in Autonomous Drivingcited by 39
- 2022Deep Learning Methods for Abstract Visual Reasoning: A Survey on Raven's Progressive Matricescited by 37
- 2022Spatial Transformer Network on Skeleton-based Gait Recognitioncited by 32
38 more
- 2021AcinoSet: A 3D Pose Estimation Dataset and Baseline Models for Cheetahs in the Wildcited by 29
- 2022DeciWatch: A Simple Baseline for 10x Efficient 2D and 3D Pose Estimationcited by 29
- 2023Dynamic Inertial Poser (DynaIP): Part-Based Motion Dynamics Learning for Enhanced Human Pose Estimation with Sparse Inertial Sensorscited by 29
- 2022Artificial Intelligence for the Metaverse: A Surveycited by 25
- 2022OSSO: Obtaining Skeletal Shape from Outsidecited by 25
- 2022HUM3DIL: Semi-supervised Multi-modal 3D Human Pose Estimation for Autonomous Drivingcited by 22
- 20222D Human Pose Estimation: A Surveycited by 21
- 2021BodyPressure -- Inferring Body Pose and Contact Pressure from a Depth Imagecited by 20
- 2023Vision-Based Human Pose Estimation via Deep Learning: A Surveycited by 20
- 2024SignCLIP: Connecting Text and Sign Language by Contrastive Learningcited by 20
- 2025Challenges and Trends in Egocentric Vision: A Surveycited by 20
- 2024Fine-Grained Side Information Guided Dual-Prompts for Zero-Shot Skeleton Action Recognitioncited by 19
- 2023Deep Learning Technique for Human Parsing: A Survey and Outlookcited by 18
- 2023Bullying10K: A Large-Scale Neuromorphic Dataset towards Privacy-Preserving Bullying Recognitioncited by 17
- 2024Tri-Modal Motion Retrieval by Learning a Joint Embedding Spacecited by 16
- 2024RT-Pose: A 4D Radar Tensor-based 3D Human Pose Estimation and Localization Benchmarkcited by 16
- 2023Unsupervised Keypoints from Pretrained Diffusion Modelscited by 15
- 2022Jointly Harnessing Prior Structures and Temporal Consistency for Sign Language Video Generationcited by 14
- 2024Survey on Modeling of Human-made Articulated Objectscited by 14
- 2023Overload: Latency Attacks on Object Detection for Edge Devicescited by 13
- 2024A Survey on 3D Human Avatar Modeling -- From Reconstruction to Generationcited by 13
- 2023Improved Trajectory Reconstruction for Markerless Pose Estimationcited by 12
- 2023Reconstructing Signing Avatars From Video Using Linguistic Priorscited by 12
- 2023A Single 2D Pose with Context is Worth Hundreds for 3D Human Pose Estimationcited by 11
- 2024Bayesian Uncertainty for Gradient Aggregation in Multi-Task Learningcited by 11
- 2024Deep learning for 3D human pose estimation and mesh recovery: A surveycited by 11
- 2022PosePipe: Open-Source Human Pose Estimation Pipeline for Clinical Researchcited by 10
- 2023Markerless Motion Capture and Biomechanical Analysis Pipelinecited by 10
- 2022FeatER: An Efficient Network for Human Reconstruction via Feature Map-Based TransformERcited by 9
- 2024Markerless Multi-view 3D Human Pose Estimation: a surveycited by 9
- 2022Transforming Gait: Video-Based Spatiotemporal Gait Analysiscited by 8
- 2022AI and 6G into the Metaverse: Fundamentals, Challenges and Future Research Trendscited by 8
- 2022AIO-P: Expanding Neural Performance Predictors Beyond Image Classificationcited by 8
- 2024A Survey on 3D Egocentric Human Pose Estimationcited by 8
- 2024HumanVLM: Foundation for Human-Scene Vision-Language Modelcited by 8
- 2021Relation-Based Associative Joint Location for Human Pose Estimation in Videoscited by 7
- 2023UniAP: Towards Universal Animal Perception in Vision via Few-shot Learningcited by 7
- 2024OpenCapBench: A Benchmark to Bridge Pose Estimation and Biomechanicscited by 7
50 most cited of 205 All 205 (JSON)
- 2026STA-TFM: Spatio-Temporal Aggregation Across Views TransForMer for Pose Estimation21 Sep 2026
- 2026A Black-Box Adversarial Attack on Human Pose Estimation and Keypoint-Based Action Recognition Models7 Sep 2026
- 2026Human-JEPA: A Human-Centric Vision Model that Perceives and Anticipates21 Aug 2026
- 2026You Only Flow Once: Calibrated and Real-Time Radar Pose Estimation with Multi-Hypothesis Normalizing Flows10 Aug 2026
- 2026Direct Clinical Joint Angle Extraction from Parametric Body Model Rotation Matrices20 Jul 2026
- 2026Biomechanics-aware Multi-view Markerless Motion Capture of Dexterous Hand Movements2 Jul 2026
- 2026An Opticalmechanics Framework for Dynamic Estimation of Multibody Systems8 Jun 2026
- 2026DisPOSE: Projected Polystochastic Diffusion for Self-Supervised Multi-View 3D Human Pose Estimation5 Jun 2026
- 2026Ultra Diffusion Poser: Diffusion-Based Human Motion Tracking From Sparse Inertial Sensors and Ranging-Based Between-Sensor Distances1 Jun 2026
- 2026GenCape: Structure-Inductive Generative Modeling for Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation13 May 2026
- 2026MoPO: Incorporating Motion Prior for Occluded Human Mesh Recovery11 May 2026
- 2026Tamaththul3D: High-Fidelity 3D Saudi Sign Language Avatars from Monocular Video6 May 2026
38 more
- 2026Pose Tracking with a Foundation Pose Model and an Ensemble Directional Kalman Filter4 May 2026
- 2026Integrated Real-Time Motion Tracking and AI Analysis for Athletic Performance Optimization23 Apr 2026
- 2026Sapiens223 Apr 2026
- 2026HumanScore: Benchmarking Human Motions in Generated Videos22 Apr 2026
- 2026Dual-stream Spatio-Temporal GCN-Transformer Network for 3D Human Pose Estimation20 Apr 2026
- 2026DGHMesh: A Large-scale Dual-radar mmWave Dataset and Generalization-focused Benchmark for Human Mesh Reconstruction19 Apr 2026
- 2026Fall Risk and Gait Analysis in Community-Dwelling Older Adults using World-Spaced 3D Human Mesh Recovery13 Apr 2026
- 2026MuPPet: Multi-person 2D-to-3D Pose Lifting8 Apr 2026
- 2026CSA-Graphs: A Privacy-Preserving Structural Dataset for Child Sexual Abuse Research8 Apr 2026
- 2026Beyond MACs: Hardware Efficient Architecture Design for Vision Backbones27 Mar 2026
- 2026Shared Representation for 3D Pose Estimation, Action Classification, and Progress Prediction from Tactile Signals26 Mar 2026
- 2026NCSTR: Node-Centric Decoupled Spatio-Temporal Reasoning for Video-based Human Pose Estimation20 Mar 2026
- 2026M3GCLR: Multi-View Mini-Max Infinite Skeleton-Data Game Contrastive Learning For Skeleton-Based Action Recognition10 Mar 2026
- 2026ER-Pose: Rethinking Keypoint-Driven Representation Learning for Real-Time Human Pose Estimation9 Mar 2026
- 2026SEAL-pose: Enhancing 3D Human Pose Estimation via a Learned Loss for Structural Consistency23 Feb 2026
- 2026WiCompass: Oracle-driven Data Scaling for mmWave Human Pose Estimation21 Feb 2026
- 2026FMPose3D: monocular 3D pose estimation via flow matching5 Feb 2026
- 2026COMPOSE: Hypergraph Cover Optimization for Multi-view 3D Human Pose Estimation14 Jan 2026
- 2026Listen to Rhythm, Choose Movements: Autoregressive Multimodal Dance Generation via Diffusion and Mamba with Decoupled Dance Dataset6 Jan 2026
- 2026Garment Inertial Denoiser (GID): Endowing Accurate Motion Capture via Loose IMU Denoiser4 Jan 2026
- 2026RePose: A Real-Time 3D Human Pose Estimation and Biomechanical Analysis Framework for Rehabilitation2 Jan 2026
- 2025M4Human: A Large-Scale Multimodal mmWave Radar Benchmark for Human Mesh Reconstruction13 Dec 2025
- 2025Dance Style Classification using Laban-Inspired and Frequency-Domain Motion Features25 Nov 2025
- 2025Graph-based 3D Human Pose Estimation using WiFi Signals24 Nov 2025
- 2025Integrating Machine Learning into Belief-Desire-Intention Agents: Current Advances and Open Challenges23 Oct 2025
- 2025Vision-Based Mistake Analysis in Procedural Activities: A Review of Advances and Challenges22 Oct 2025
- 2025NTKMTL: Mitigating Task Imbalance in Multi-Task Learning from Neural Tangent Kernel Perspective21 Oct 2025
- 2025Robotic Classification of Divers' Swimming States using Visual Pose Keypoints as IMUs15 Oct 2025
- 2025On the Use of Hierarchical Vision Foundation Models for Low-Cost Human Mesh Recovery and Pose Estimation14 Oct 2025
- 2025Meaningful Pose-Based Sign Language Evaluation8 Oct 2025
- 2025Paving the Way Towards Kinematic Assessment Using Monocular Video: A Preclinical Benchmark of State-of-the-Art Deep-Learning-Based 3D Human Pose Estimators Against Inertial Sensors in Daily Living Activities2 Oct 2025
- 2025Selecting Optimal Camera Views for Gait Analysis: A Multi-Metric Assessment of 2D Projections22 Sep 2025
- 20253D Human Pose and Shape Estimation from LiDAR Point Clouds: A Review15 Sep 2025
- 2025Robust Fetal Pose Estimation across Gestational Ages via Cross-Population Augmentation15 Sep 2025
- 2025TrueSkin: Towards Fair and Accurate Skin Tone Recognition and Generation13 Sep 2025
- 2025MultimodalHugs: Enabling Sign Language Processing in Hugging Face10 Sep 2025
- 2025Enhancing Online Learning by Integrating Biosensors and Multimodal Learning Analytics for Detecting and Predicting Student Behavior: A Review9 Sep 2025
- 2025Mixture of Global and Local Experts with Diffusion Transformer for Controllable Face Generation30 Aug 2025
50 newest of 205 All 205 (JSON)
- 2023Unsupervised Keypoints from Pretrained Diffusion Modelscited by 15
- 2025Mixture of Global and Local Experts with Diffusion Transformer for Controllable Face Generationcited by 4
- 2026FMPose3D: monocular 3D pose estimation via flow matchingcited by 3
- 2024Sprite Sheet Diffusion: Generate Game Character for Animationcited by 1
- 2026Ultra Diffusion Poser: Diffusion-Based Human Motion Tracking From Sparse Inertial Sensors and Ranging-Based Between-Sensor Distancescited by 0
- 2026You Only Flow Once: Calibrated and Real-Time Radar Pose Estimation with Multi-Hypothesis Normalizing Flowscited by 0
- 2026You Only Flow Once: Calibrated and Real-Time Radar Pose Estimation with Multi-Hypothesis Normalizing Flows10 Aug 2026
- 2026Ultra Diffusion Poser: Diffusion-Based Human Motion Tracking From Sparse Inertial Sensors and Ranging-Based Between-Sensor Distances1 Jun 2026
- 2026FMPose3D: monocular 3D pose estimation via flow matching5 Feb 2026
- 2025Mixture of Global and Local Experts with Diffusion Transformer for Controllable Face Generation30 Aug 2025
- 2024Sprite Sheet Diffusion: Generate Game Character for Animation4 Dec 2024
- 2023Unsupervised Keypoints from Pretrained Diffusion Models29 Nov 2023
- 2022Capturing and Inferring Dense Full-Body Human-Scene Contactcited by 176
- 2022Recovering 3D Human Mesh from Monocular Images: A Surveycited by 103
- 20233D Human Pose Estimation via Intuitive Physicscited by 100
- 2023Beyond Appearance: a Semantic Controllable Self-Supervised Learning Framework for Human-Centric Visual Taskscited by 94
- 2023PoseFormerV2: Exploring Frequency Domain for Efficient and Robust 3D Human Pose Estimationcited by 91
- 2022PoseGPT: Quantization-based 3D Human Motion Generation and Forecastingcited by 78
- 2023SynBody: Synthetic Dataset with Layered Human Models for 3D Human Perception and Modelingcited by 54
- 2022Learning 3D Human Pose Estimation from Dozens of Datasets using a Geometry-Aware Autoencoder to Bridge Between Skeleton Formatscited by 50
- 2023GLA-GCN: Global-local Adaptive Graph Convolutional Network for 3D Human Pose Estimation from Monocular Videocited by 46
- 2021Multi-modal 3D Human Pose Estimation with 2D Weak Supervision in Autonomous Drivingcited by 39
- 2022Spatial Transformer Network on Skeleton-based Gait Recognitioncited by 32
- 2021AcinoSet: A 3D Pose Estimation Dataset and Baseline Models for Cheetahs in the Wildcited by 29
12 most cited of 194 All 194 (JSON)
- 2026STA-TFM: Spatio-Temporal Aggregation Across Views TransForMer for Pose Estimation21 Sep 2026
- 2026A Black-Box Adversarial Attack on Human Pose Estimation and Keypoint-Based Action Recognition Models7 Sep 2026
- 2026Human-JEPA: A Human-Centric Vision Model that Perceives and Anticipates21 Aug 2026
- 2026Direct Clinical Joint Angle Extraction from Parametric Body Model Rotation Matrices20 Jul 2026
- 2026Biomechanics-aware Multi-view Markerless Motion Capture of Dexterous Hand Movements2 Jul 2026
- 2026An Opticalmechanics Framework for Dynamic Estimation of Multibody Systems8 Jun 2026
- 2026DisPOSE: Projected Polystochastic Diffusion for Self-Supervised Multi-View 3D Human Pose Estimation5 Jun 2026
- 2026GenCape: Structure-Inductive Generative Modeling for Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation13 May 2026
- 2026MoPO: Incorporating Motion Prior for Occluded Human Mesh Recovery11 May 2026
- 2026Tamaththul3D: High-Fidelity 3D Saudi Sign Language Avatars from Monocular Video6 May 2026
- 2026Pose Tracking with a Foundation Pose Model and an Ensemble Directional Kalman Filter4 May 2026
- 2026Integrated Real-Time Motion Tracking and AI Analysis for Athletic Performance Optimization23 Apr 2026
12 newest of 194 All 194 (JSON)