# FeatER: An Efficient Network for Human Reconstruction via Feature Map-Based TransformER

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.15448 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15448/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (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)
- [Simple Baselines for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06208/) (2018)
- [TransReID: Transformer-based Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04378/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Human Pose and Mesh Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09760/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Convolution: Attention over Convolution Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03458/) (2019)
- [An End-to-End Transformer Model for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08141/) (2021)
- [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)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation with Spatial and Temporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10455/) (2021)
- [Mesh Graphormer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00272/) (2021)
- [PyMAF: 3D Human Pose and Shape Regression with Pyramidal Mesh Alignment Feedback Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16507/) (2021)
- [Pose2Mesh: Graph Convolutional Network for 3D Human Pose and Mesh Recovery from a 2D Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09047/) (2020)
- [Group-Free 3D Object Detection via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00678/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning-Based Human Pose Estimation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13392/) (2020)
- [Distribution-Aware Coordinate Representation for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06278/) (2019)
- [Beyond Static Features for Temporally Consistent 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08627/) (2020)
- [Probabilistic Modeling for Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11944/) (2021)
- [MHFormer: Multi-Hypothesis Transformer for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12707/) (2021)
- [HRFormer: High-Resolution Transformer for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09408/) (2021)
- [TransPose: Keypoint Localization via Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14214/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Part Aware Contrastive Learning for Self-Supervised Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00666/) (2023)
- [Frequency Guidance Matters: Skeletal Action Recognition by Frequency-Aware Mixed Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12322/) (2024)
- [A Single 2D Pose with Context is Worth Hundreds for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03312/) (2023)
- [Human Mesh Recovery from Arbitrary Multi-view Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12434/) (2024)
- [DiSRT-In-Bed: Diffusion-Based Sim-to-Real Transfer Framework for In-Bed Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03006/) (2025)
- [LAMP: Leveraging Language Prompts for Multi-person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11934/) (2023)
- [Fast SAM 3D Body: Accelerating SAM 3D Body for Real-Time Full-Body Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15603/) (2026)
- [Behavior Imitation for Manipulator Control and Grasping with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01284/) (2024)
- [RemoCap: Disentangled Representation Learning for Motion Capture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12724/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, vision transformers have shown great success in a set of human reconstruction tasks such as 2D human pose estimation (2D HPE), 3D human pose estimation (3D HPE), and human mesh reconstruction (HMR) tasks. In these tasks, feature map representations of the human structural information are often extracted first from the image by a CNN (such as HRNet), and then further processed by transformer to predict the heatmaps (encodes each joint's location into a feature map with a Gaussian distribution) for HPE or HMR. However, existing transformer architectures are not able to process these feature map inputs directly, forcing an unnatural flattening of the location-sensitive human structural information. Furthermore, much of the performance benefit in recent HPE and HMR methods has come at the cost of ever-increasing computation and memory needs. Therefore, to simultaneously address these problems, we propose FeatER, a novel transformer design that preserves the inherent structure of feature map representations when modeling attention while reducing memory and computational costs. Taking advantage of FeatER, we build an efficient network for a set of human reconstruction tasks including 2D HPE, 3D HPE, and HMR. A feature map reconstruction module is applied to improve the performance of the estimated human pose and mesh. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FeatER on various human pose and mesh datasets. For instance, FeatER outperforms the SOTA method MeshGraphormer by requiring 5% of Params and 16% of MACs on Human3.6M and 3DPW datasets. The project webpage is https://zczcwh.github.io/feater_page/.