# Scene-Aware 3D Multi-Human Motion Capture from a Single Camera

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.05175 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05175/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 61 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (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)
- [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)
- [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)
- [RMPE: Regional Multi-person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00137/) (2016)
- [HuMoR: 3D Human Motion Model for Robust Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04668/) (2021)
- [Resolving 3D Human Pose Ambiguities with 3D Scene Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06963/) (2019)
- [Integral Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08229/) (2017)
- [BEHAVE: Dataset and Method for Tracking Human Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06950/) (2022)
- [Coarse-to-Fine Volumetric Prediction for Single-Image 3D Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07828/) (2016)
- [Monocular, One-stage, Regression of Multiple 3D People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12272/) (2020)
- [Single-Shot Multi-Person 3D Pose Estimation From Monocular RGB](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.03453/) (2017)
- [Capturing and Inferring Dense Full-Body Human-Scene Contact](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09553/) (2022)
- [DeepCap: Monocular Human Performance Capture Using Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08325/) (2020)
- [GLAMR: Global Occlusion-Aware Human Mesh Recovery with Dynamic Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01524/) (2021)
- [Putting People in their Place: Monocular Regression of 3D People in Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08274/) (2021)
- [EgoBody: Human Body Shape and Motion of Interacting People from Head-Mounted Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07642/) (2021)
- [Human POSEitioning System (HPS): 3D Human Pose Estimation and Self-localization in Large Scenes from Body-Mounted Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17265/) (2021)
- [Coherent Reconstruction of Multiple Humans from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08586/) (2020)
- [Camera Distance-aware Top-down Approach for 3D Multi-person Pose Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11346/) (2019)
- [VNect: Real-time 3D Human Pose Estimation with a Single RGB Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01583/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Nymeria: A Massive Collection of Multimodal Egocentric Daily Motion in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09905/) (2024)
- [DiffuseStyleGesture: Stylized Audio-Driven Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04919/) (2023)
- [PACE: Human and Camera Motion Estimation from in-the-wild Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13768/) (2023)
- [WHAC: World-grounded Humans and Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12959/) (2024)
- [Joint Optimization for 4D Human-Scene Reconstruction in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02158/) (2025)
- [ROAM: Robust and Object-Aware Motion Generation Using Neural Pose Descriptors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12969/) (2023)
- [Reconstructing Groups of People with Hypergraph Relational Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15844/) (2023)
- [Synergistic Global-space Camera and Human Reconstruction from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14855/) (2024)
- [DivaTrack: Diverse Bodies and Motions from Acceleration-Enhanced Three-Point Trackers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09211/) (2024)
- [AvatarPose: Avatar-guided 3D Pose Estimation of Close Human Interaction from Sparse Multi-view Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02110/) (2024)
- [WheelPose: Data Synthesis Techniques to Improve Pose Estimation Performance on Wheelchair Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17063/) (2024)
- [Humans as Checkerboards: Calibrating Camera Motion Scale for World-Coordinate Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00574/) (2024)
- [Progressive Inertial Poser: Progressive Real-Time Kinematic Chain Estimation for 3D Full-Body Pose from Three IMU Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05336/) (2025)
- [Text to Blind Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05277/) (2024)
- [MMHU: A Massive-Scale Multimodal Benchmark for Human Behavior Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12463/) (2025)
- [Multi-HMR 2: Multi-Person Camera-Centric Human Detection, Mesh Recovery and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14841/) (2026)
- [SHARE: Scene-Human Aligned Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15342/) (2025)
- [Contrastive Multi-Modal Hypergraph Reasoning for 3D Crowd Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13854/) (2026)
- [RHINO: Reconstructing Human Interactions with Novel Objects from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17014/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we consider the problem of estimating the 3D position of multiple humans in a scene as well as their body shape and articulation from a single RGB video recorded with a static camera. In contrast to expensive marker-based or multi-view systems, our lightweight setup is ideal for private users as it enables an affordable 3D motion capture that is easy to install and does not require expert knowledge. To deal with this challenging setting, we leverage recent advances in computer vision using large-scale pre-trained models for a variety of modalities, including 2D body joints, joint angles, normalized disparity maps, and human segmentation masks. Thus, we introduce the first non-linear optimization-based approach that jointly solves for the absolute 3D position of each human, their articulated pose, their individual shapes as well as the scale of the scene. In particular, we estimate the scene depth and person unique scale from normalized disparity predictions using the 2D body joints and joint angles. Given the per-frame scene depth, we reconstruct a point-cloud of the static scene in 3D space. Finally, given the per-frame 3D estimates of the humans and scene point-cloud, we perform a space-time coherent optimization over the video to ensure temporal, spatial and physical plausibility. We evaluate our method on established multi-person 3D human pose benchmarks where we consistently outperform previous methods and we qualitatively demonstrate that our method is robust to in-the-wild conditions including challenging scenes with people of different sizes.