# Hierarchical Kinematic Probability Distributions for 3D Human Shape and Pose Estimation from Images in the Wild

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.00990 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00990/

## Key facts

- Cited by 48 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05770/) (2015)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [PIFu: Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution Clothed Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05172/) (2019)
- [Accelerating 3D Deep Learning with PyTorch3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08501/) (2020)
- [Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08128/) (2016)
- [Learning to Reconstruct 3D Human Pose and Shape via Model-fitting in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12828/) (2019)
- [DensePose: Dense Human Pose Estimation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00434/) (2018)
- [PIFuHD: Multi-Level Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution 3D Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00452/) (2020)
- [PointRend: Image Segmentation as Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08193/) (2019)
- [Learning from Synthetic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01370/) (2017)
- [HybrIK: A Hybrid Analytical-Neural Inverse Kinematics Solution for 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14672/) (2020)
- [I2L-MeshNet: Image-to-Lixel Prediction Network for Accurate 3D Human Pose and Mesh Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03713/) (2020)
- [Convolutional Mesh Regression for Single-Image Human Shape Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03244/) (2019)
- [Pose2Mesh: Graph Convolutional Network for 3D Human Pose and Mesh Recovery from a 2D Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09047/) (2020)
- [Multi-Garment Net: Learning to Dress 3D People from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06903/) (2019)
- [Total Capture: A 3D Deformation Model for Tracking Faces, Hands, and Bodies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01615/) (2018)
- [Learning to Estimate 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Color Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04092/) (2018)
- [Unite the People: Closing the Loop Between 3D and 2D Human Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.02468/) (2017)
- [Neural Body Fitting: Unifying Deep Learning and Model-Based Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05942/) (2018)
- [Probabilistic Modeling for Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11944/) (2021)
- [BodyNet: Volumetric Inference of 3D Human Body Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04875/) (2018)
- [DenseRaC: Joint 3D Pose and Shape Estimation by Dense Render-and-Compare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00116/) (2019)
- [Generating Multiple Hypotheses for 3D Human Pose Estimation with Mixture Density Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05547/) (2019)
- [Probabilistic Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13788/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [BEDLAM: A Synthetic Dataset of Bodies Exhibiting Detailed Lifelike Animated Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16940/) (2023)
- [PyMAF-X: Towards Well-aligned Full-body Model Regression from Monocular Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06400/) (2022)
- [Recovering 3D Human Mesh from Monocular Images: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01923/) (2022)
- [Neural Localizer Fields for Continuous 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07532/) (2024)
- [Accurate 3D Body Shape Regression using Metric and Semantic Attributes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07036/) (2022)
- [TORE: Token Reduction for Efficient Human Mesh Recovery with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10705/) (2022)
- [Learned Vertex Descent: A New Direction for 3D Human Model Fitting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06254/) (2022)
- [SplatArmor: Articulated Gaussian splatting for animatable humans from monocular RGB videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10812/) (2023)
- [3D-Aware Neural Body Fitting for Occlusion Robust 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10123/) (2023)
- [HuManiFlow: Ancestor-Conditioned Normalising Flows on SO(3) Manifolds for Human Pose and Shape Distribution Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06968/) (2023)
- [Look Ma, no markers: holistic performance capture without the hassle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11520/) (2024)
- [POCO: 3D Pose and Shape Estimation with Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12965/) (2023)
- [MEGA: Masked Generative Autoencoder for Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18839/) (2024)
- [DiffHuman: Probabilistic Photorealistic 3D Reconstruction of Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00485/) (2024)
- [SimpleEgo: Predicting Probabilistic Body Pose from Egocentric Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14785/) (2024)
- [AAMDM: Accelerated Auto-regressive Motion Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06146/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised Human Mesh Recovery with Cross-Representation Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04596/) (2022)
- [Progressive Multi-view Human Mesh Recovery with Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05223/) (2022)
- [Body Knowledge and Uncertainty Modeling for Monocular 3D Human Body Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00799/) (2023)
- [Normalizing Flows on the Product Space of SO(3) Manifolds for Probabilistic Human Pose Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05675/) (2024)
- [Controlling Human Shape and Pose in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04724/) (2024)
- [ADHMR: Aligning Diffusion-based Human Mesh Recovery via Direct Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10250/) (2025)
- [KBody: Towards general, robust, and aligned monocular whole-body estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11542/) (2023)
- [Probabilistic Estimation of 3D Human Shape and Pose with a Semantic Local Parametric Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15404/) (2021)
- [Multi-hypotheses Conditioned Point Cloud Diffusion for 3D Human Reconstruction from Occluded Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18364/) (2024)
- [CondiMen: Conditional Multi-Person Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13058/) (2024)
- [ShapeBoost: Boosting Human Shape Estimation with Part-Based Parameterization and Clothing-Preserving Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01345/) (2024)
- [Utilizing Uncertainty in 2D Pose Detectors for Probabilistic 3D Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16289/) (2024)
- [Human Body Measurement Estimation with Adversarial Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05667/) (2022)
- [MoCap-to-Visual Domain Adaptation for Efficient Human Mesh Estimation from 2D Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07094/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper addresses the problem of 3D human body shape and pose estimation from an RGB image. This is often an ill-posed problem, since multiple plausible 3D bodies may match the visual evidence present in the input - particularly when the subject is occluded. Thus, it is desirable to estimate a distribution over 3D body shape and pose conditioned on the input image instead of a single 3D reconstruction. We train a deep neural network to estimate a hierarchical matrix-Fisher distribution over relative 3D joint rotation matrices (i.e. body pose), which exploits the human body's kinematic tree structure, as well as a Gaussian distribution over SMPL body shape parameters. To further ensure that the predicted shape and pose distributions match the visual evidence in the input image, we implement a differentiable rejection sampler to impose a reprojection loss between ground-truth 2D joint coordinates and samples from the predicted distributions, projected onto the image plane. We show that our method is competitive with the state-of-the-art in terms of 3D shape and pose metrics on the SSP-3D and 3DPW datasets, while also yielding a structured probability distribution over 3D body shape and pose, with which we can meaningfully quantify prediction uncertainty and sample multiple plausible 3D reconstructions to explain a given input image. Code is available at https://github.com/akashsengupta1997/HierarchicalProbabilistic3DHuman .