# ElePose: Unsupervised 3D Human Pose Estimation by Predicting Camera Elevation and Learning Normalizing Flows on 2D Poses

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.07088 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07088/

## Key facts

- Cited by 35 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Density estimation using Real NVP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08803/) (2016)
- [VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05656/) (2019)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)
- [3D human pose estimation in video with temporal convolutions and semi-supervised training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11742/) (2018)
- [A simple yet effective baseline for 3d human pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03098/) (2017)
- [Cascaded Pyramid Network for Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07319/) (2017)
- [PARE: Part Attention Regressor for 3D Human Body Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08527/) (2021)
- [HybrIK: A Hybrid Analytical-Neural Inverse Kinematics Solution for 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14672/) (2020)
- [Mesh Graphormer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00272/) (2021)
- [Integral Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08229/) (2017)
- [Coarse-to-Fine Volumetric Prediction for Single-Image 3D Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07828/) (2016)
- [Probabilistic Modeling for Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11944/) (2021)
- [SPEC: Seeing People in the Wild with an Estimated Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00620/) (2021)
- [VNect: Real-time 3D Human Pose Estimation with a Single RGB Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01583/) (2017)
- [Compositional Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00159/) (2017)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation = 2D Pose Estimation + Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06524/) (2016)
- [Ordinal Depth Supervision for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04095/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of 3D Human Pose using Multi-view Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02330/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised 3D Pose Estimation with Geometric Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04812/) (2019)
- [Weakly Supervised 3D Human Pose and Shape Reconstruction with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10350/) (2020)
- [Exploiting temporal information for 3D pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08585/) (2017)
- [RepNet: Weakly Supervised Training of an Adversarial Reprojection Network for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09868/) (2019)
- [Probabilistic Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13788/) (2021)
- [Cascaded deep monocular 3D human pose estimation with evolutionary training data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07778/) (2020)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation from a Single Image via Distance Matrix Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09010/) (2016)
- [Lifting from the Deep: Convolutional 3D Pose Estimation from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.00295/) (2017)
- [Learning Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation from Multi-view Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04775/) (2018)
- [XNect: Real-time Multi-Person 3D Motion Capture with a Single RGB Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00837/) (2019)
- [Weakly-Supervised 3D Human Pose Learning via Multi-view Images in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07581/) (2020)
- [CanonPose: Self-Supervised Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14679/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [DiffPose: Multi-hypothesis Human Pose Estimation using Diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16487/) (2022)
- [MAS: Multi-view Ancestral Sampling for 3D motion generation using 2D diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14729/) (2023)
- [Back to Optimization: Diffusion-based Zero-Shot 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03833/) (2023)
- [MoCapDeform: Monocular 3D Human Motion Capture in Deformable Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08439/) (2022)
- [Improving 3D Pose Estimation for Sign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09525/) (2023)
- [Lifting Motion to the 3D World via 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18808/) (2024)
- [Self-supervised 3D Human Pose Estimation from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02349/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised 3D Pose Estimation with Non-Rigid Structure-from-Motion Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10705/) (2023)
- [LInKs "Lifting Independent Keypoints" -- Partial Pose Lifting for Occlusion Handling with Improved Accuracy in 2D-3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07243/) (2023)
- [StackFLOW: Monocular Human-Object Reconstruction by Stacked Normalizing Flow with Offset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20545/) (2024)
- [Improving the Robustness of 3D Human Pose Estimation: A Benchmark and Learning from Noisy Input](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06797/) (2023)
- [PADS: Plug-and-Play 3D Human Pose Analysis via Diffusion Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08930/) (2024)
- [STGFormer: Spatio-Temporal GraphFormer for 3D Human Pose Estimation in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10099/) (2024)
- [PersPose: 3D Human Pose Estimation with Perspective Encoding and Perspective Rotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17239/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised 3D Keypoint Discovery with Multi-View Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12829/) (2022)
- [A Horse with no Labels: Self-Supervised Horse Pose Estimation from Unlabelled Images and Synthetic Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03411/) (2023)
- [Every Angle Is Worth A Second Glance: Mining Kinematic Skeletal Structures from Multi-view Joint Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02936/) (2025)
- [Learning to Control Physically-simulated 3D Characters via Generating and Mimicking 2D Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08500/) (2025)
- [AnyLift: Scaling Motion Reconstruction from Internet Videos via 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17818/) (2026)
- [Visualizing Skiers' Trajectories in Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02994/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Multi-Person 3D Human Pose Estimation From 2D Poses Alone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14865/) (2023)
- [EPOCH: Jointly Estimating the 3D Pose of Cameras and Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19726/) (2024)
- [Spectral Compression Transformer with Line Pose Graph for Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21309/) (2025)
- [Bimanual 3D Hand Motion and Articulation Forecasting in Everyday Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06145/) (2025)
- [Optimising 2D Pose Representation: Improve Accuracy, Stability and Generalisability Within Unsupervised 2D-3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00618/) (2022)
- [Learning from Abstract Images: on the Importance of Occlusion in a Minimalist Encoding of Human Poses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09893/) (2023)
- [Mirror-Aware Neural Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04750/) (2023)
- [Semantic and Articulated Pedestrian Sensing Onboard a Moving Vehicle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06313/) (2023)
- [Two Views Are Better than One: Monocular 3D Pose Estimation with Multiview Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12421/) (2023)
- [Using Motion Cues to Supervise Single-Frame Body Pose and Shape Estimation in Low Data Regimes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02736/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human pose estimation from single images is a challenging problem that is typically solved by supervised learning. Unfortunately, labeled training data does not yet exist for many human activities since 3D annotation requires dedicated motion capture systems. Therefore, we propose an unsupervised approach that learns to predict a 3D human pose from a single image while only being trained with 2D pose data, which can be crowd-sourced and is already widely available. To this end, we estimate the 3D pose that is most likely over random projections, with the likelihood estimated using normalizing flows on 2D poses. While previous work requires strong priors on camera rotations in the training data set, we learn the distribution of camera angles which significantly improves the performance. Another part of our contribution is to stabilize training with normalizing flows on high-dimensional 3D pose data by first projecting the 2D poses to a linear subspace. We outperform the state-of-the-art unsupervised human pose estimation methods on the benchmark datasets Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP in many metrics.