# HTNet: Human Topology Aware Network for 3D Human Pose Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.09790 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09790/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Cascaded Pyramid Network for Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07319/) (2017)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation with Spatial and Temporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10455/) (2021)
- [MHFormer: Multi-Hypothesis Transformer for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12707/) (2021)
- [Towards 3D Human Pose Estimation in the Wild: a Weakly-supervised Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02447/) (2017)
- [Graph Stacked Hourglass Networks for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16385/) (2021)
- [SRNet: Improving Generalization in 3D Human Pose Estimation with a Split-and-Recombine Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09389/) (2020)
- [Pose-guided Feature Disentangling for Occluded Person Re-identification Based on Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02466/) (2021)
- [Learning Skeletal Graph Neural Networks for Hard 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07181/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised 3D Human Pose Estimation via Part Guided Novel Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04400/) (2020)
- [GraphMLP: A Graph MLP-Like Architecture for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06420/) (2022)

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

- [Double-chain Constraints for 3D Human Pose Estimation in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05298/) (2023)
- [NanoHTNet: Nano Human Topology Network for Efficient 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15763/) (2025)
- [Diffusion-based Pose Refinement and Muti-hypothesis Generation for 3D Human Pose Estimaiton](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04921/) (2024)
- [Spectral Compression Transformer with Line Pose Graph for Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21309/) (2025)
- [Probablistic Restoration with Adaptive Noise Sampling for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02114/) (2024)
- [KAD-Net: Kinematics-Aware Decoupled Learning for Robust 3D Hand Pose Estimation from a Single Depth Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12559/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D human pose estimation errors would propagate along the human body topology and accumulate at the end joints of limbs. Inspired by the backtracking mechanism in automatic control systems, we design an Intra-Part Constraint module that utilizes the parent nodes as the reference to build topological constraints for end joints at the part level. Further considering the hierarchy of the human topology, joint-level and body-level dependencies are captured via graph convolutional networks and self-attentions, respectively. Based on these designs, we propose a novel Human Topology aware Network (HTNet), which adopts a channel-split progressive strategy to sequentially learn the structural priors of the human topology from multiple semantic levels: joint, part, and body. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method improves the estimation accuracy by 18.7% on the end joints of limbs and achieves state-of-the-art results on Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/vefalun/HTNet.