# Learning Articulated Shape with Keypoint Pseudo-labels from Web Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.14396 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14396/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Apr 2023.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [Learning to Reconstruct 3D Human Pose and Shape via Model-fitting in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12828/) (2019)
- [Simple Baselines for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06208/) (2018)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross Pseudo Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01226/) (2021)
- [Neural 3D Mesh Renderer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07566/) (2017)
- [PARE: Part Attention Regressor for 3D Human Body Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08527/) (2021)
- [Learning Category-Specific Mesh Reconstruction from Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07549/) (2018)
- [3D Menagerie: Modeling the 3D shape and pose of animals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07700/) (2016)
- [YFCC100M: The New Data in Multimedia Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.01817/) (2015)
- [BANMo: Building Animatable 3D Neural Models from Many Casual Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12761/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Single-view 3D Reconstruction via Semantic Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06473/) (2020)
- [Data Distillation: Towards Omni-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04440/) (2017)
- [LASR: Learning Articulated Shape Reconstruction from a Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02976/) (2021)
- [MagicPony: Learning Articulated 3D Animals in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12497/) (2022)
- [Cross-Domain Adaptation for Animal Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05806/) (2019)
- [Shape and Viewpoint without Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10982/) (2020)
- [Articulation-aware Canonical Surface Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00614/) (2020)
- [Who Left the Dogs Out? 3D Animal Reconstruction with Expectation Maximization in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11110/) (2020)
- [Learning from Synthetic Animals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08265/) (2019)
- [Canonical Surface Mapping via Geometric Cycle Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10043/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Score-Guided Diffusion for 3D Human Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09623/) (2024)
- [AnimatableDreamer: Text-Guided Non-rigid 3D Model Generation and Reconstruction with Canonical Score Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03795/) (2023)
- [Ponymation: Learning Articulated 3D Animal Motions from Unlabeled Online Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13604/) (2023)
- [Dessie: Disentanglement for Articulated 3D Horse Shape and Pose Estimation from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03438/) (2024)
- [Towards Multi-Modal Animal Pose Estimation: A Survey and In-Depth Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09312/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper shows that it is possible to learn models for monocular 3D reconstruction of articulated objects (e.g., horses, cows, sheep), using as few as 50-150 images labeled with 2D keypoints. Our proposed approach involves training category-specific keypoint estimators, generating 2D keypoint pseudo-labels on unlabeled web images, and using both the labeled and self-labeled sets to train 3D reconstruction models. It is based on two key insights: (1) 2D keypoint estimation networks trained on as few as 50-150 images of a given object category generalize well and generate reliable pseudo-labels; (2) a data selection mechanism can automatically create a "curated" subset of the unlabeled web images that can be used for training -- we evaluate four data selection methods. Coupling these two insights enables us to train models that effectively utilize web images, resulting in improved 3D reconstruction performance for several articulated object categories beyond the fully-supervised baseline. Our approach can quickly bootstrap a model and requires only a few images labeled with 2D keypoints. This requirement can be easily satisfied for any new object category. To showcase the practicality of our approach for predicting the 3D shape of arbitrary object categories, we annotate 2D keypoints on giraffe and bear images from COCO -- the annotation process takes less than 1 minute per image.