# SmoothNet: A Plug-and-Play Network for Refining Human Poses in Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.13715 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13715/

## Key facts

- Cited by 64 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07455/) (2018)
- [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)
- [NTU RGB+D: A Large Scale Dataset for 3D Human Activity Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02808/) (2016)
- [Learning to Reconstruct 3D Human Pose and Shape via Model-fitting in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12828/) (2019)
- [VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05656/) (2019)
- [NTU RGB+D 120: A Large-Scale Benchmark for 3D Human Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04757/) (2019)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)
- [AI Choreographer: Music Conditioned 3D Dance Generation with AIST++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08779/) (2021)
- [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)
- [What Makes Training Multi-Modal Classification Networks Hard?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12681/) (2019)
- [Cascaded Pyramid Network for Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07319/) (2017)
- [HuMoR: 3D Human Motion Model for Robust Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04668/) (2021)
- [Learning 3D Human Dynamics from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01601/) (2018)
- [HybrIK: A Hybrid Analytical-Neural Inverse Kinematics Solution for 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14672/) (2020)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation with Spatial and Temporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10455/) (2021)
- [Semantic Graph Convolutional Networks for 3D Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03345/) (2019)
- [Single-Shot Multi-Person 3D Pose Estimation From Monocular RGB](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.03453/) (2017)
- [The Evolved Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11117/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 64)

- [Motion-X: A Large-scale 3D Expressive Whole-body Human Motion Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00818/) (2023)
- [MotionBERT: A Unified Perspective on Learning Human Motion Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06551/) (2022)
- [One-Stage 3D Whole-Body Mesh Recovery with Component Aware Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16160/) (2023)
- [HuMMan: Multi-Modal 4D Human Dataset for Versatile Sensing and Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13686/) (2022)
- [HumanSD: A Native Skeleton-Guided Diffusion Model for Human Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04269/) (2023)
- [HumanTOMATO: Text-aligned Whole-body Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12978/) (2023)
- [Recovering 3D Human Mesh from Monocular Images: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01923/) (2022)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation via Intuitive Physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18246/) (2023)
- [TOCH: Spatio-Temporal Object-to-Hand Correspondence for Motion Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07982/) (2022)
- [Human-Art: A Versatile Human-Centric Dataset Bridging Natural and Artificial Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02760/) (2023)
- [Visibility Aware Human-Object Interaction Tracking from Single RGB Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16479/) (2023)
- [SynBody: Synthetic Dataset with Layered Human Models for 3D Human Perception and Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17368/) (2023)
- [I'M HOI: Inertia-aware Monocular Capture of 3D Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08869/) (2023)
- [AiOS: All-in-One-Stage Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17934/) (2024)
- [D&D: Learning Human Dynamics from Dynamic Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08790/) (2022)
- [Zolly: Zoom Focal Length Correctly for Perspective-Distorted Human Mesh Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13796/) (2023)
- [UniTalker: Scaling up Audio-Driven 3D Facial Animation through A Unified Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00762/) (2024)
- [DeciWatch: A Simple Baseline for 10x Efficient 2D and 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08713/) (2022)
- [PhysPT: Physics-aware Pretrained Transformer for Estimating Human Dynamics from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04430/) (2024)
- [Cyclic Test-Time Adaptation on Monocular Video for 3D Human Mesh Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06554/) (2023)
- [Dance with You: The Diversity Controllable Dancer Generation via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13551/) (2023)
- [SocialGen: Modeling Multi-Human Social Interaction with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22906/) (2025)
- [CARI4D: Category Agnostic 4D Reconstruction of Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11988/) (2025)
- [Neural Interactive Keypoint Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10174/) (2023)
- [GaitRef: Gait Recognition with Refined Sequential Skeletons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07916/) (2023)
- [ProxyCap: Real-time Monocular Full-body Capture in World Space via Human-Centric Proxy-to-Motion Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01200/) (2023)
- [Motion-2-To-3: Leveraging 2D Motion Data for 3D Motion Generations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13111/) (2024)
- [Co3Gesture: Towards Coherent Concurrent Co-speech 3D Gesture Generation with Interactive Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01746/) (2025)
- [ActionPrompt: Action-Guided 3D Human Pose Estimation With Text and Pose Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09026/) (2023)
- [HumMUSS: Human Motion Understanding using State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10880/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

When analyzing human motion videos, the output jitters from existing pose estimators are highly-unbalanced with varied estimation errors across frames. Most frames in a video are relatively easy to estimate and only suffer from slight jitters. In contrast, for rarely seen or occluded actions, the estimated positions of multiple joints largely deviate from the ground truth values for a consecutive sequence of frames, rendering significant jitters on them. To tackle this problem, we propose to attach a dedicated temporal-only refinement network to existing pose estimators for jitter mitigation, named SmoothNet. Unlike existing learning-based solutions that employ spatio-temporal models to co-optimize per-frame precision and temporal smoothness at all the joints, SmoothNet models the natural smoothness characteristics in body movements by learning the long-range temporal relations of every joint without considering the noisy correlations among joints. With a simple yet effective motion-aware fully-connected network, SmoothNet improves the temporal smoothness of existing pose estimators significantly and enhances the estimation accuracy of those challenging frames as a side-effect. Moreover, as a temporal-only model, a unique advantage of SmoothNet is its strong transferability across various types of estimators and datasets. Comprehensive experiments on five datasets with eleven popular backbone networks across 2D and 3D pose estimation and body recovery tasks demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed solution. Code is available at https://github.com/cure-lab/SmoothNet.