# Probabilistic Modeling for Human Mesh Recovery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.11944 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11944/

## Key facts

- Cited by 153 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05770/) (2015)
- [Density estimation using Real NVP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08803/) (2016)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03039/) (2018)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [NICE: Non-linear Independent Components Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.8516/) (2014)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08128/) (2016)
- [Masked Autoregressive Flow for Density Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07057/) (2017)
- [Improving Variational Inference with Inverse Autoregressive Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04934/) (2016)
- [Learning to Reconstruct 3D Human Pose and Shape via Model-fitting in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12828/) (2019)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)
- [GRAB: A Dataset of Whole-Body Human Grasping of Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11200/) (2020)
- [A simple yet effective baseline for 3d human pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03098/) (2017)
- [Learning Category-Specific Mesh Reconstruction from Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07549/) (2018)
- [MADE: Masked Autoencoder for Distribution Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03509/) (2015)
- [Convolutional Mesh Regression for Single-Image Human Shape Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03244/) (2019)
- [Coarse-to-Fine Volumetric Prediction for Single-Image 3D Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07828/) (2016)
- [Unite the People: Closing the Loop Between 3D and 2D Human Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.02468/) (2017)
- [STAR: Sparse Trained Articulated Human Body Regressor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08535/) (2020)
- [Learning Likelihoods with Conditional Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00042/) (2019)
- [Monocular Total Capture: Posing Face, Body, and Hands in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01598/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 153)

- [Humans in 4D: Reconstructing and Tracking Humans with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20091/) (2023)
- [CLIFF: Carrying Location Information in Full Frames into Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00571/) (2022)
- [MotionBERT: A Unified Perspective on Learning Human Motion Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06551/) (2022)
- [GLAMR: Global Occlusion-Aware Human Mesh Recovery with Dynamic Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01524/) (2021)
- [PyMAF-X: Towards Well-aligned Full-body Model Regression from Monocular Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06400/) (2022)
- [Decoupling Human and Camera Motion from Videos in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12827/) (2023)
- [EgoBody: Human Body Shape and Motion of Interacting People from Head-Mounted Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07642/) (2021)
- [UniDexGrasp: Universal Robotic Dexterous Grasping via Learning Diverse Proposal Generation and Goal-Conditioned Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00938/) (2023)
- [Recovering 3D Human Mesh from Monocular Images: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01923/) (2022)
- [TokenHMR: Advancing Human Mesh Recovery with a Tokenized Pose Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16752/) (2024)
- [TRACE: 5D Temporal Regression of Avatars with Dynamic Cameras in 3D Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02850/) (2023)
- [DiffPose: Multi-hypothesis Human Pose Estimation using Diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16487/) (2022)
- [GFPose: Learning 3D Human Pose Prior with Gradient Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08641/) (2022)
- [FLAG: Flow-based 3D Avatar Generation from Sparse Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05789/) (2022)
- [HybrIK-X: Hybrid Analytical-Neural Inverse Kinematics for Whole-body Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05690/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Kinematic Probability Distributions for 3D Human Shape and Pose Estimation from Images in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00990/) (2021)
- [ReFit: Recurrent Fitting Network for 3D Human Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11184/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Deep Gait Recognition: Algorithms, Datasets and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13732/) (2022)
- [NIKI: Neural Inverse Kinematics with Invertible Neural Networks for 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08590/) (2023)
- [LiDAR-aid Inertial Poser: Large-scale Human Motion Capture by Sparse Inertial and LiDAR Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15410/) (2022)
- [3D Human Mesh Estimation from Virtual Markers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11726/) (2023)
- [Animal3D: A Comprehensive Dataset of 3D Animal Pose and Shape](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11737/) (2023)
- [I'M HOI: Inertia-aware Monocular Capture of 3D Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08869/) (2023)
- [Generative Proxemics: A Prior for 3D Social Interaction from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09337/) (2023)
- [Realistic Full-Body Tracking from Sparse Observations via Joint-Level Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08855/) (2023)
- [Score-Guided Diffusion for 3D Human Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09623/) (2024)
- [Learned Vertex Descent: A New Direction for 3D Human Model Fitting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06254/) (2022)
- [ElePose: Unsupervised 3D Human Pose Estimation by Predicting Camera Elevation and Learning Normalizing Flows on 2D Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07088/) (2021)
- [PACE: Human and Camera Motion Estimation from in-the-wild Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13768/) (2023)
- [Probabilistic Human Mesh Recovery in 3D Scenes from Egocentric Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06024/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper focuses on the problem of 3D human reconstruction from 2D evidence. Although this is an inherently ambiguous problem, the majority of recent works avoid the uncertainty modeling and typically regress a single estimate for a given input. In contrast to that, in this work, we propose to embrace the reconstruction ambiguity and we recast the problem as learning a mapping from the input to a distribution of plausible 3D poses. Our approach is based on the normalizing flows model and offers a series of advantages. For conventional applications, where a single 3D estimate is required, our formulation allows for efficient mode computation. Using the mode leads to performance that is comparable with the state of the art among deterministic unimodal regression models. Simultaneously, since we have access to the likelihood of each sample, we demonstrate that our model is useful in a series of downstream tasks, where we leverage the probabilistic nature of the prediction as a tool for more accurate estimation. These tasks include reconstruction from multiple uncalibrated views, as well as human model fitting, where our model acts as a powerful image-based prior for mesh recovery. Our results validate the importance of probabilistic modeling, and indicate state-of-the-art performance across a variety of settings. Code and models are available at: https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~nkolot/projects/prohmr.