# BEDLAM: A Synthetic Dataset of Bodies Exhibiting Detailed Lifelike Animated Motion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.16940 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16940/

## Key facts

- Cited by 236 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 83 of its 106 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 83)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [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)
- [AMASS: Archive of Motion Capture as Surface Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03278/) (2019)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [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)
- [MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08172/) (2019)
- [Albumentations: fast and flexible image augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06839/) (2018)
- [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)
- [AI Choreographer: Music Conditioned 3D Dance Generation with AIST++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08779/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Human Pose and Mesh Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09760/) (2020)
- [GRAB: A Dataset of Whole-Body Human Grasping of Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.11200/) (2020)
- [Learning from Synthetic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01370/) (2017)
- [PARE: Part Attention Regressor for 3D Human Body Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08527/) (2021)
- [HybrIK: A Hybrid Analytical-Neural Inverse Kinematics Solution for 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14672/) (2020)
- [Resolving 3D Human Pose Ambiguities with 3D Scene Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06963/) (2019)
- [Generating 3D faces using Convolutional Mesh Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10267/) (2018)
- [Mesh Graphormer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00272/) (2021)
- [BABEL: Bodies, Action and Behavior with English Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09696/) (2021)
- [PyMAF: 3D Human Pose and Shape Regression with Pyramidal Mesh Alignment Feedback Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16507/) (2021)
- [BEHAVE: Dataset and Method for Tracking Human Object Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06950/) (2022)
- [Multi-Garment Net: Learning to Dress 3D People from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06903/) (2019)
- [CLIFF: Carrying Location Information in Full Frames into Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00571/) (2022)
- [Learning to Estimate 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Color Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04092/) (2018)
- [AGORA: Avatars in Geography Optimized for Regression Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14643/) (2021)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 236)

- [Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02073/) (2024)
- [Effective Whole-body Pose Estimation with Two-stages Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15880/) (2023)
- [WHAM: Reconstructing World-grounded Humans with Accurate 3D Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07531/) (2023)
- [UniDepthV2: Universal Monocular Metric Depth Estimation Made Simpler](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20110/) (2025)
- [SMPLer-X: Scaling Up Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17448/) (2023)
- [Scaling Up Dynamic Human-Scene Interaction Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08629/) (2024)
- [World-Grounded Human Motion Recovery via Gravity-View Coordinates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06662/) (2024)
- [WiLoR: End-to-end 3D Hand Localization and Reconstruction in-the-wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12259/) (2024)
- [Nymeria: A Massive Collection of Multimodal Egocentric Daily Motion in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09905/) (2024)
- [TRAM: Global Trajectory and Motion of 3D Humans from in-the-wild Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17346/) (2024)
- [Multi-HMR: Multi-Person Whole-Body Human Mesh Recovery in a Single Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14654/) (2024)
- [Inter-X: Towards Versatile Human-Human Interaction Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16051/) (2023)
- [TokenHMR: Advancing Human Mesh Recovery with a Tokenized Pose Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16752/) (2024)
- [SpatialTrackerV2: 3D Point Tracking Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12462/) (2025)
- [STream3R: Scalable Sequential 3D Reconstruction with Causal Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10893/) (2025)
- [OpenHumanVid: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Enhancing Human-Centric Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00115/) (2024)
- [PromptHMR: Promptable Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06397/) (2025)
- [CameraHMR: Aligning People with Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08128/) (2024)
- [HumanVid: Demystifying Training Data for Camera-controllable Human Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17438/) (2024)
- [UniK3D: Universal Camera Monocular 3D Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16591/) (2025)
- [Human4DiT: 360-degree Human Video Generation with 4D Diffusion Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17405/) (2024)
- [Neural Localizer Fields for Continuous 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07532/) (2024)
- [4D-DRESS: A 4D Dataset of Real-world Human Clothing with Semantic Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18630/) (2024)
- [GENMO: A GENeralist Model for Human MOtion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01425/) (2025)
- [ReFit: Recurrent Fitting Network for 3D Human Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11184/) (2023)
- [NeoVerse: Enhancing 4D World Model with in-the-wild Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00393/) (2026)
- [Human-3Diffusion: Realistic Avatar Creation via Explicit 3D Consistent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08475/) (2024)
- [AiOS: All-in-One-Stage Expressive Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17934/) (2024)
- [Template Free Reconstruction of Human-object Interaction with Procedural Interaction Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07063/) (2023)
- [Human3R: Everyone Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06219/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We show, for the first time, that neural networks trained only on synthetic data achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on the problem of 3D human pose and shape (HPS) estimation from real images. Previous synthetic datasets have been small, unrealistic, or lacked realistic clothing. Achieving sufficient realism is non-trivial and we show how to do this for full bodies in motion. Specifically, our BEDLAM dataset contains monocular RGB videos with ground-truth 3D bodies in SMPL-X format. It includes a diversity of body shapes, motions, skin tones, hair, and clothing. The clothing is realistically simulated on the moving bodies using commercial clothing physics simulation. We render varying numbers of people in realistic scenes with varied lighting and camera motions. We then train various HPS regressors using BEDLAM and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on real-image benchmarks despite training with synthetic data. We use BEDLAM to gain insights into what model design choices are important for accuracy. With good synthetic training data, we find that a basic method like HMR approaches the accuracy of the current SOTA method (CLIFF). BEDLAM is useful for a variety of tasks and all images, ground truth bodies, 3D clothing, support code, and more are available for research purposes. Additionally, we provide detailed information about our synthetic data generation pipeline, enabling others to generate their own datasets. See the project page: https://bedlam.is.tue.mpg.de/.