# Deep Learning Technique for Human Parsing: A Survey and Outlook

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00394 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00394/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 129 of its 229 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 129)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05520/) (2018)
- [Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00868/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [4D-DRESS: A 4D Dataset of Real-world Human Clothing with Semantic Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18630/) (2024)
- [Image-Based Virtual Try-On: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04811/) (2023)
- [OmniTry: Virtual Try-On Anything without Masks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13632/) (2025)
- [What Decreases Editing Capability? Domain-Specific Hybrid Refinement for Improved GAN Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12141/) (2023)
- [Image is All You Need to Empower Large-scale Diffusion Models for In-Domain Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08195/) (2023)
- [Total Selfie: Generating Full-Body Selfies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14740/) (2023)
- [Frequency-based Matcher for Long-tailed Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03917/) (2024)
- [E4C: Enhance Editability for Text-Based Image Editing by Harnessing Efficient CLIP Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10133/) (2024)
- [SCHNet: SAM Marries CLIP for Human Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22237/) (2025)
- [Deep Learning for Human Parsing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12416/) (2023)
- [FashionComposer: Compositional Fashion Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14168/) (2024)
- [ReMu: Reconstructing Multi-layer 3D Clothed Human from Image Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01381/) (2025)
- [Leveraging Multi-View Weak Supervision for Occlusion-Aware Multi-Human Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.10093/) (2025)
- [A review of Recent Techniques for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22690/) (2025)
- [Human Action Recognition from Point Clouds over Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05506/) (2025)
- [RobustGait: Robustness Analysis for Appearance Based Gait Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13065/) (2025)
- [Sketch It Out: Exploring Label-Free Structural Cues for Multimodal Gait Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05537/) (2026)
- [PointRL: Learning Point-Level Vision-Language Grounding from Verifiable Annotation Evidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25299/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human parsing aims to partition humans in image or video into multiple pixel-level semantic parts. In the last decade, it has gained significantly increased interest in the computer vision community and has been utilized in a broad range of practical applications, from security monitoring, to social media, to visual special effects, just to name a few. Although deep learning-based human parsing solutions have made remarkable achievements, many important concepts, existing challenges, and potential research directions are still confusing. In this survey, we comprehensively review three core sub-tasks: single human parsing, multiple human parsing, and video human parsing, by introducing their respective task settings, background concepts, relevant problems and applications, representative literature, and datasets. We also present quantitative performance comparisons of the reviewed methods on benchmark datasets. Additionally, to promote sustainable development of the community, we put forward a transformer-based human parsing framework, providing a high-performance baseline for follow-up research through universal, concise, and extensible solutions. Finally, we point out a set of under-investigated open issues in this field and suggest new directions for future study. We also provide a regularly updated project page, to continuously track recent developments in this fast-advancing field: https://github.com/soeaver/awesome-human-parsing.