# Aligning Silhouette Topology for Self-Adaptive 3D Human Pose Recovery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.01276 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01276/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Identity Mappings in Deep Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05027/) (2016)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [Universal adversarial perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.08401/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)
- [A simple yet effective baseline for 3d human pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03098/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05644/) (2015)
- [Learning from Synthetic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01370/) (2017)
- [Convolutional Pose Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.00134/) (2016)
- [Learning 3D Human Dynamics from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01601/) (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)
- [See More, Know More: Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation with Co-Attention Siamese Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06810/) (2020)
- [VNect: Real-time 3D Human Pose Estimation with a Single RGB Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01583/) (2017)
- [Self-supervised Learning of Motion Capture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01337/) (2017)
- [Towards Accurate Markerless Human Shape and Pose Estimation over Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07548/) (2017)
- [Generalizable Data-free Objective for Crafting Universal Adversarial Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08092/) (2018)
- [Creatures great and SMAL: Recovering the shape and motion of animals from video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05804/) (2018)
- [Sim2real transfer learning for 3D human pose estimation: motion to the rescue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02499/) (2019)
- [Learning Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation from Multi-view Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04775/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Cyclic Test-Time Adaptation on Monocular Video for 3D Human Mesh Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06554/) (2023)
- [KBody: Towards general, robust, and aligned monocular whole-body estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11542/) (2023)
- [MoCap-to-Visual Domain Adaptation for Efficient Human Mesh Estimation from 2D Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07094/) (2024)
- [STRIDE: Single-video based Temporally Continuous Occlusion-Robust 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16221/) (2023)
- [Shape-from-Template with Generalised Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13791/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Articulation-centric 2D/3D pose supervision forms the core training objective in most existing 3D human pose estimation techniques. Except for synthetic source environments, acquiring such rich supervision for each real target domain at deployment is highly inconvenient. However, we realize that standard foreground silhouette estimation techniques (on static camera feeds) remain unaffected by domain-shifts. Motivated by this, we propose a novel target adaptation framework that relies only on silhouette supervision to adapt a source-trained model-based regressor. However, in the absence of any auxiliary cue (multi-view, depth, or 2D pose), an isolated silhouette loss fails to provide a reliable pose-specific gradient and requires to be employed in tandem with a topology-centric loss. To this end, we develop a series of convolution-friendly spatial transformations in order to disentangle a topological-skeleton representation from the raw silhouette. Such a design paves the way to devise a Chamfer-inspired spatial topological-alignment loss via distance field computation, while effectively avoiding any gradient hindering spatial-to-pointset mapping. Experimental results demonstrate our superiority against prior-arts in self-adapting a source trained model to diverse unlabeled target domains, such as a) in-the-wild datasets, b) low-resolution image domains, and c) adversarially perturbed image domains (via UAP).