# DiffPose: Multi-hypothesis Human Pose Estimation using Diffusion models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.16487 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16487/

## Key facts

- Cited by 65 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in 3D, point cloud and scene generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 37 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Nov 2022.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [3D, point cloud and scene generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/3d-point-cloud-and-scene-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [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)
- [VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05656/) (2019)
- [CSDI: Conditional Score-based Diffusion Models for Probabilistic Time Series Imputation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03502/) (2021)
- [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)
- [HybrIK: A Hybrid Analytical-Neural Inverse Kinematics Solution for 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14672/) (2020)
- [Semantic Graph Convolutional Networks for 3D Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03345/) (2019)
- [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)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation = 2D Pose Estimation + Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06524/) (2016)
- [D2C: Diffusion-Denoising Models for Few-shot Conditional Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06819/) (2021)
- [Weakly Supervised 3D Human Pose and Shape Reconstruction with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10350/) (2020)
- [Generating Multiple Hypotheses for 3D Human Pose Estimation with Mixture Density Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05547/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Cascaded deep monocular 3D human pose estimation with evolutionary training data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07778/) (2020)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation by Generation and Ordinal Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01324/) (2019)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation from a Single Image via Distance Matrix Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09010/) (2016)
- [CanonPose: Self-Supervised Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14679/) (2020)
- [3D Multi-bodies: Fitting Sets of Plausible 3D Human Models to Ambiguous Image Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00980/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [Diffusion-Based 3D Human Pose Estimation with Multi-Hypothesis Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11579/) (2023)
- [DiffusionPoser: Real-time Human Motion Reconstruction From Arbitrary Sparse Sensors Using Autoregressive Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16682/) (2023)
- [Egocentric Whole-Body Motion Capture with FisheyeViT and Diffusion-Based Motion Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16495/) (2023)
- [Multi-agent Long-term 3D Human Pose Forecasting via Interaction-aware Trajectory Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05218/) (2024)
- [Motion2VecSets: 4D Latent Vector Set Diffusion for Non-rigid Shape Reconstruction and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06614/) (2024)
- [Parallel Vertex Diffusion for Unified Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07216/) (2023)
- [HMD^2: Environment-aware Motion Generation from Single Egocentric Head-Mounted Device](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13426/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Model for Dense Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19094/) (2023)
- [Closely Interactive Human Reconstruction with Proxemics and Physics-Guided Adaption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11291/) (2024)
- [Confronting Ambiguity in 6D Object Pose Estimation via Score-Based Diffusion on SE(3)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15873/) (2023)
- [HHMR: Holistic Hand Mesh Recovery by Enhancing the Multimodal Controllability of Graph Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01334/) (2024)
- [REWIND: Real-Time Egocentric Whole-Body Motion Diffusion with Exemplar-Based Identity Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04956/) (2025)
- [MonoDiffusion: Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation Using Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07198/) (2023)
- [DPoser-X: Diffusion Model as Robust 3D Whole-body Human Pose Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00599/) (2025)
- [HandDiff: 3D Hand Pose Estimation with Diffusion on Image-Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03159/) (2024)
- [Open-Vocabulary 3D Semantic Segmentation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13642/) (2024)
- [AddBiomechanics Dataset: Capturing the Physics of Human Motion at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18537/) (2024)
- [FurniScene: A Large-scale 3D Room Dataset with Intricate Furnishing Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03470/) (2024)
- [Guided Diffusion from Self-Supervised Diffusion Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08825/) (2023)
- [Bridging the Skeleton-Text Modality Gap: Diffusion-Powered Modality Alignment for Zero-shot Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10745/) (2024)
- [HiPART: Hierarchical Pose AutoRegressive Transformer for Occluded 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23331/) (2025)
- [DiffHand: End-to-End Hand Mesh Reconstruction via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13705/) (2023)
- [Human Pose-based Estimation, Tracking and Action Recognition with Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13039/) (2023)
- [ManiPose: Manifold-Constrained Multi-Hypothesis 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06386/) (2023)
- [DiffSF: Diffusion Models for Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05327/) (2024)
- [UPose3D: Uncertainty-Aware 3D Human Pose Estimation with Cross-View and Temporal Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14634/) (2024)
- [Learning Structure-Guided Diffusion Model for 2D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17074/) (2023)
- [CHAMP: Conformalized 3D Human Multi-Hypothesis Pose Estimators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06141/) (2024)
- [Multi-hypotheses Conditioned Point Cloud Diffusion for 3D Human Reconstruction from Occluded Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18364/) (2024)
- [Utilizing Uncertainty in 2D Pose Detectors for Probabilistic 3D Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16289/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Traditionally, monocular 3D human pose estimation employs a machine learning model to predict the most likely 3D pose for a given input image. However, a single image can be highly ambiguous and induces multiple plausible solutions for the 2D-3D lifting step which results in overly confident 3D pose predictors. To this end, we propose DiffPose, a conditional diffusion model, that predicts multiple hypotheses for a given input image. In comparison to similar approaches, our diffusion model is straightforward and avoids intensive hyperparameter tuning, complex network structures, mode collapse, and unstable training. Moreover, we tackle a problem of the common two-step approach that first estimates a distribution of 2D joint locations via joint-wise heatmaps and consecutively approximates them based on first- or second-moment statistics. Since such a simplification of the heatmaps removes valid information about possibly correct, though labeled unlikely, joint locations, we propose to represent the heatmaps as a set of 2D joint candidate samples. To extract information about the original distribution from these samples we introduce our embedding transformer that conditions the diffusion model. Experimentally, we show that DiffPose slightly improves upon the state of the art for multi-hypothesis pose estimation for simple poses and outperforms it by a large margin for highly ambiguous poses.