# Weakly-supervised Pre-training for 3D Human Pose Estimation via Perspective Knowledge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.11983 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11983/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [Simple Baselines for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06208/) (2018)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)
- [End-to-End Human Pose and Mesh Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09760/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Learning from Synthetic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01370/) (2017)
- [Cascaded Pyramid Network for Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07319/) (2017)
- [Integral Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08229/) (2017)
- [CrowdPose: Efficient Crowded Scenes Pose Estimation and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00324/) (2018)
- [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)
- [PoseTrack: A Benchmark for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10000/) (2017)
- [Learnable Triangulation of Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05754/) (2019)
- [Camera Distance-aware Top-down Approach for 3D Multi-person Pose Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11346/) (2019)
- [Human Pose Regression with Residual Log-likelihood Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11291/) (2021)
- [Compositional Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00159/) (2017)
- [Towards 3D Human Pose Estimation in the Wild: a Weakly-supervised Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02447/) (2017)
- [Ordinal Depth Supervision for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04095/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of 3D Human Pose using Multi-view Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02330/) (2019)
- [SRNet: Improving Generalization in 3D Human Pose Estimation with a Split-and-Recombine Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09389/) (2020)
- [Detailed 2D-3D Joint Representation for Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08154/) (2020)
- [Cross View Fusion for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01203/) (2019)
- [LCR-Net++: Multi-person 2D and 3D Pose Detection in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00455/) (2018)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation in the Wild by Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09722/) (2018)
- [RepNet: Weakly Supervised Training of an Adversarial Reprojection Network for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09868/) (2019)
- [Probabilistic Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13788/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [PSVT: End-to-End Multi-person 3D Pose and Shape Estimation with Progressive Video Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09187/) (2023)
- [Human Pose-based Estimation, Tracking and Action Recognition with Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13039/) (2023)
- [Pre-training a Density-Aware Pose Transformer for Robust LiDAR-based 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13454/) (2024)
- [Bridging the Semantic-Numerical Gap: A Numerical Reasoning Method of Cross-modal Knowledge Graph for Material Property Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09744/) (2023)
- [Comparison of Kinematics and Kinetics Between OpenCap and a Marker-Based Motion Capture System in Cycling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03766/) (2024)
- [StarPose: 3D Human Pose Estimation via Spatial-Temporal Autoregressive Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02056/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modern deep learning-based 3D pose estimation approaches require plenty of 3D pose annotations. However, existing 3D datasets lack diversity, which limits the performance of current methods and their generalization ability. Although existing methods utilize 2D pose annotations to help 3D pose estimation, they mainly focus on extracting 2D structural constraints from 2D poses, ignoring the 3D information hidden in the images. In this paper, we propose a novel method to extract weak 3D information directly from 2D images without 3D pose supervision. Firstly, we utilize 2D pose annotations and perspective prior knowledge to generate the relationship of that keypoint is closer or farther from the camera, called relative depth. We collect a 2D pose dataset (MCPC) and generate relative depth labels. Based on MCPC, we propose a weakly-supervised pre-training (WSP) strategy to distinguish the depth relationship between two points in an image. WSP enables the learning of the relative depth of two keypoints on lots of in-the-wild images, which is more capable of predicting depth and generalization ability for 3D human pose estimation. After fine-tuning on 3D pose datasets, WSP achieves state-of-the-art results on two widely-used benchmarks.