# PoseFormerV2: Exploring Frequency Domain for Efficient and Robust 3D Human Pose Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.17472 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17472/

## Key facts

- Cited by 92 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [Masked Feature Prediction for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09133/) (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)
- [Cascaded Pyramid Network for Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07319/) (2017)
- [I2L-MeshNet: Image-to-Lixel Prediction Network for Accurate 3D Human Pose and Mesh Estimation from a Single RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03713/) (2020)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation with Spatial and Temporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10455/) (2021)
- [Global Filter Networks for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00645/) (2021)
- [Adaptive Fourier Neural Operators: Efficient Token Mixers for Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13587/) (2021)
- [Learning Trajectory Dependencies for Human Motion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05436/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning-Based Human Pose Estimation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13392/) (2020)
- [Learning in the Frequency Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12416/) (2020)
- [History Repeats Itself: Human Motion Prediction via Motion Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11755/) (2020)
- [MixSTE: Seq2seq Mixed Spatio-Temporal Encoder for 3D Human Pose Estimation in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00859/) (2022)
- [MHFormer: Multi-Hypothesis Transformer for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12707/) (2021)
- [Multiview Transformers for Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04288/) (2022)
- [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, 30 of 92)

- [MotionAGFormer: Enhancing 3D Human Pose Estimation with a Transformer-GCNFormer Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16288/) (2023)
- [EmotionGesture: Audio-Driven Diverse Emotional Co-Speech 3D Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18891/) (2023)
- [KTPFormer: Kinematics and Trajectory Prior Knowledge-Enhanced Transformer for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00658/) (2024)
- [Multi-agent Long-term 3D Human Pose Forecasting via Interaction-aware Trajectory Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05218/) (2024)
- [PhysPT: Physics-aware Pretrained Transformer for Estimating Human Dynamics from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04430/) (2024)
- [3D Human Pose Perception from Egocentric Stereo Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00889/) (2023)
- [FinePOSE: Fine-Grained Prompt-Driven 3D Human Pose Estimation via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05216/) (2024)
- [Hourglass Tokenizer for Efficient Transformer-Based 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12028/) (2023)
- [AthletePose3D: A Benchmark Dataset for 3D Human Pose Estimation and Kinematic Validation in Athletic Movements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07499/) (2025)
- [Learning Dense Hand Contact Estimation from Imbalanced Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11152/) (2025)
- [Attention-Propagation Network for Egocentric Heatmap to 3D Pose Lifting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18330/) (2024)
- [CoMotion: Concurrent Multi-person 3D Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12186/) (2025)
- [A Single 2D Pose with Context is Worth Hundreds for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03312/) (2023)
- [FreeMan: Towards Benchmarking 3D Human Pose Estimation under Real-World Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05073/) (2023)
- [Bring Your Rear Cameras for Egocentric 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11652/) (2025)
- [GAITGen: Disentangled Motion-Pathology Impaired Gait Generative Model -- Bringing Motion Generation to the Clinical Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22397/) (2025)
- [Human Pose-based Estimation, Tracking and Action Recognition with Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13039/) (2023)
- [HumMUSS: Human Motion Understanding using State Space Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10880/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Skeleton-based Motion Encoder Models for Clinical Applications: Estimating Parkinson's Disease Severity in Walking Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17817/) (2024)
- [Exploring Temporal Dynamics in Event-based Eye Tracker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23725/) (2025)
- [Frequency-Semantic Enhanced Variational Autoencoder for Zero-Shot Skeleton-based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22179/) (2025)
- [CARE-PD: A Multi-Site Anonymized Clinical Dataset for Parkinson's Disease Gait Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04312/) (2025)
- [H2OT: Hierarchical Hourglass Tokenizer for Efficient Video Pose Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06956/) (2025)
- [THFM: A Unified Video Foundation Model for 4D Human Perception and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25892/) (2026)
- [MPM: A Unified 2D-3D Human Pose Representation via Masked Pose Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17201/) (2023)
- [LAMP: Leveraging Language Prompts for Multi-person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11934/) (2023)
- [Double-chain Constraints for 3D Human Pose Estimation in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05298/) (2023)
- [EgoPoseFormer: A Simple Baseline for Stereo Egocentric 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18080/) (2024)
- [HGMamba: Enhancing 3D Human Pose Estimation with a HyperGCN-Mamba Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06638/) (2025)
- [FastHMR: Accelerating Human Mesh Recovery via Token and Layer Merging with Diffusion Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10868/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, transformer-based methods have gained significant success in sequential 2D-to-3D lifting human pose estimation. As a pioneering work, PoseFormer captures spatial relations of human joints in each video frame and human dynamics across frames with cascaded transformer layers and has achieved impressive performance. However, in real scenarios, the performance of PoseFormer and its follow-ups is limited by two factors: (a) The length of the input joint sequence; (b) The quality of 2D joint detection. Existing methods typically apply self-attention to all frames of the input sequence, causing a huge computational burden when the frame number is increased to obtain advanced estimation accuracy, and they are not robust to noise naturally brought by the limited capability of 2D joint detectors. In this paper, we propose PoseFormerV2, which exploits a compact representation of lengthy skeleton sequences in the frequency domain to efficiently scale up the receptive field and boost robustness to noisy 2D joint detection. With minimum modifications to PoseFormer, the proposed method effectively fuses features both in the time domain and frequency domain, enjoying a better speed-accuracy trade-off than its precursor. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets (i.e., Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP) demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the original PoseFormer and other transformer-based variants. Code is released at urlhttps://github.com/QitaoZhao/PoseFormerV2.