# Pose-NDF: Modeling Human Pose Manifolds with Neural Distance Fields

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.13807 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13807/

## Key facts

- Cited by 85 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [Implicit Neural Representations with Periodic Activation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09661/) (2020)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13961/) (2020)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [Accelerating 3D Deep Learning with PyTorch3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08501/) (2020)
- [Implicit Geometric Regularization for Learning Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10099/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Neural Fields in Visual Computing and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11426/) (2021)
- [Action-Conditioned 3D Human Motion Synthesis with Transformer VAE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05670/) (2021)
- [Action2Motion: Conditioned Generation of 3D Human Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15240/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05644/) (2015)
- [HuMoR: 3D Human Motion Model for Robust Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04668/) (2021)
- [Deep Local Shapes: Learning Local SDF Priors for Detailed 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10983/) (2020)
- [Neural Unsigned Distance Fields for Implicit Function Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13938/) (2020)
- [ARCH: Animatable Reconstruction of Clothed Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04572/) (2020)
- [BEHAVE: Dataset and Method for Tracking Human Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06950/) (2022)
- [Multi-Garment Net: Learning to Dress 3D People from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06903/) (2019)
- [Neural Body Fitting: Unifying Deep Learning and Model-Based Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05942/) (2018)
- [SCANimate: Weakly Supervised Learning of Skinned Clothed Avatar Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03313/) (2021)
- [HP-GAN: Probabilistic 3D human motion prediction via GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09561/) (2017)
- [ARCH++: Animation-Ready Clothed Human Reconstruction Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07845/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 85)

- [Human Motion Diffusion as a Generative Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01418/) (2023)
- [Humans in 4D: Reconstructing and Tracking Humans with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20091/) (2023)
- [Decoupling Human and Camera Motion from Videos in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12827/) (2023)
- [Nymeria: A Massive Collection of Multimodal Egocentric Daily Motion in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09905/) (2024)
- [TokenHMR: Advancing Human Mesh Recovery with a Tokenized Pose Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16752/) (2024)
- [MonoHuman: Animatable Human Neural Field from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02001/) (2023)
- [NIFTY: Neural Object Interaction Fields for Guided Human Motion Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07511/) (2023)
- [Visibility Aware Human-Object Interaction Tracking from Single RGB Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16479/) (2023)
- [GFPose: Learning 3D Human Pose Prior with Gradient Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08641/) (2022)
- [PoseVocab: Learning Joint-structured Pose Embeddings for Human Avatar Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13006/) (2023)
- [Neural Sign Actors: A diffusion model for 3D sign language production from text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02702/) (2023)
- [ReFit: Recurrent Fitting Network for 3D Human Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11184/) (2023)
- [NIKI: Neural Inverse Kinematics with Invertible Neural Networks for 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08590/) (2023)
- [I'M HOI: Inertia-aware Monocular Capture of 3D Human-Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08869/) (2023)
- [Generative Proxemics: A Prior for 3D Social Interaction from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09337/) (2023)
- [Score-Guided Diffusion for 3D Human Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09623/) (2024)
- [Template Free Reconstruction of Human-object Interaction with Procedural Interaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07063/) (2023)
- [GeneOH Diffusion: Towards Generalizable Hand-Object Interaction Denoising via Denoising Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14810/) (2024)
- [CIMI4D: A Large Multimodal Climbing Motion Dataset under Human-scene Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17948/) (2023)
- [NRDF: Neural Riemannian Distance Fields for Learning Articulated Pose Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03122/) (2024)
- [Garment3DGen: 3D Garment Stylization and Texture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18816/) (2024)
- [InterTrack: Tracking Human Object Interaction without Object Templates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13953/) (2024)
- [Deformer: Dynamic Fusion Transformer for Robust Hand Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04991/) (2023)
- [NSF: Neural Surface Fields for Human Modeling from Monocular Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14847/) (2023)
- [Modiff: Action-Conditioned 3D Motion Generation with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03949/) (2023)
- [HHMR: Holistic Hand Mesh Recovery by Enhancing the Multimodal Controllability of Graph Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01334/) (2024)
- [Learning Human Mesh Recovery in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03847/) (2023)
- [Prior-guided Source-free Domain Adaptation for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13954/) (2023)
- [VQ-HPS: Human Pose and Shape Estimation in a Vector-Quantized Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08291/) (2023)
- [DPoser-X: Diffusion Model as Robust 3D Whole-body Human Pose Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00599/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Pose-NDF, a continuous model for plausible human poses based on neural distance fields (NDFs). Pose or motion priors are important for generating realistic new poses and for reconstructing accurate poses from noisy or partial observations. Pose-NDF learns a manifold of plausible poses as the zero level set of a neural implicit function, extending the idea of modeling implicit surfaces in 3D to the high-dimensional domain SO(3)^K, where a human pose is defined by a single data point, represented by K quaternions. The resulting high-dimensional implicit function can be differentiated with respect to the input poses and thus can be used to project arbitrary poses onto the manifold by using gradient descent on the set of 3-dimensional hyperspheres. In contrast to previous VAE-based human pose priors, which transform the pose space into a Gaussian distribution, we model the actual pose manifold, preserving the distances between poses. We demonstrate that PoseNDF outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods as a prior in various downstream tasks, ranging from denoising real-world human mocap data, pose recovery from occluded data to 3D pose reconstruction from images. Furthermore, we show that it can be used to generate more diverse poses by random sampling and projection than VAE-based methods.