# Recovering 3D Human Mesh from Monocular Images: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.01923 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01923/

## Key facts

- Cited by 103 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 183 of its 360 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 183)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [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)
- [VGGFace2: A dataset for recognising faces across pose and age](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08092/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Neural Body: Implicit Neural Representations with Structured Latent Codes for Novel View Synthesis of Dynamic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15838/) (2020)
- [Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14808/) (2020)
- [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)
- [DensePose: Dense Human Pose Estimation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00434/) (2018)
- [How far are we from solving the 2D & 3D Face Alignment problem? (and a dataset of 230,000 3D facial landmarks)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07332/) (2017)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)
- [Accurate 3D Face Reconstruction with Weakly-Supervised Learning: From Single Image to Image Set](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08527/) (2019)
- [Learning an Animatable Detailed 3D Face Model from In-The-Wild Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04012/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Human Pose and Mesh Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09760/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 103)

- [CLIFF: Carrying Location Information in Full Frames into Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00571/) (2022)
- [Capturing and Inferring Dense Full-Body Human-Scene Contact](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09553/) (2022)
- [PyMAF-X: Towards Well-aligned Full-body Model Regression from Monocular Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06400/) (2022)
- [One-Stage 3D Whole-Body Mesh Recovery with Component Aware Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16160/) (2023)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation via Intuitive Physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18246/) (2023)
- [InterCap: Joint Markerless 3D Tracking of Humans and Objects in Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12354/) (2022)
- [Capturing and Animation of Body and Clothing from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01868/) (2022)
- [GIMO: Gaze-Informed Human Motion Prediction in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09443/) (2022)
- [SiTH: Single-view Textured Human Reconstruction with Image-Conditioned Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15855/) (2023)
- [Neural Localizer Fields for Continuous 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07532/) (2024)
- [Visibility Aware Human-Object Interaction Tracking from Single RGB Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16479/) (2023)
- [MIME: Human-Aware 3D Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04360/) (2022)
- [Learning Implicit Templates for Point-Based Clothed Human Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06955/) (2022)
- [Learning Disentangled Avatars with Hybrid 3D Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06441/) (2023)
- [TORE: Token Reduction for Efficient Human Mesh Recovery with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10705/) (2022)
- [AnySkill: Learning Open-Vocabulary Physical Skill for Interactive Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12835/) (2024)
- [POTTER: Pooling Attention Transformer for Efficient Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13357/) (2023)
- [State of the Art in Dense Monocular Non-Rigid 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15664/) (2022)
- [Embodied Scene-aware Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09106/) (2022)
- [Benchmarking and Analyzing 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation Beyond Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10529/) (2022)
- [FOF: Learning Fourier Occupancy Field for Monocular Real-time Human Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02194/) (2022)
- [CIMI4D: A Large Multimodal Climbing Motion Dataset under Human-scene Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17948/) (2023)
- [Distribution-Aligned Diffusion for Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13369/) (2023)
- [HUM3DIL: Semi-supervised Multi-modal 3D Human Pose Estimation for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07729/) (2022)
- [Synergistic Global-space Camera and Human Reconstruction from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14855/) (2024)
- [RELI11D: A Comprehensive Multimodal Human Motion Dataset and Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19501/) (2024)
- [Med-2E3: A 2D-Enhanced 3D Medical Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12783/) (2024)
- [Generative Approach for Probabilistic Human Mesh Recovery using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02963/) (2023)
- [A Survey on 3D Human Avatar Modeling -- From Reconstruction to Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04253/) (2024)
- [Crowd3D: Towards Hundreds of People Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09376/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Estimating human pose and shape from monocular images is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Since the release of statistical body models, 3D human mesh recovery has been drawing broader attention. With the same goal of obtaining well-aligned and physically plausible mesh results, two paradigms have been developed to overcome challenges in the 2D-to-3D lifting process: i) an optimization-based paradigm, where different data terms and regularization terms are exploited as optimization objectives; and ii) a regression-based paradigm, where deep learning techniques are embraced to solve the problem in an end-to-end fashion. Meanwhile, continuous efforts are devoted to improving the quality of 3D mesh labels for a wide range of datasets. Though remarkable progress has been achieved in the past decade, the task is still challenging due to flexible body motions, diverse appearances, complex environments, and insufficient in-the-wild annotations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey that focuses on the task of monocular 3D human mesh recovery. We start with the introduction of body models and then elaborate recovery frameworks and training objectives by providing in-depth analyses of their strengths and weaknesses. We also summarize datasets, evaluation metrics, and benchmark results. Open issues and future directions are discussed in the end, hoping to motivate researchers and facilitate their research in this area. A regularly updated project page can be found at https://github.com/tinatiansjz/hmr-survey.