# DiffPose: SpatioTemporal Diffusion Model for Video-Based Human Pose Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16687 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16687/

## Key facts

- Cited by 36 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in 3D, point cloud and scene generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 65 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jul 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [3D, point cloud and scene generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/3d-point-cloud-and-scene-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03006/) (2021)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [Improved Techniques for Training Score-Based Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09011/) (2020)
- [Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14217/) (2022)
- [Blended Diffusion for Text-driven Editing of Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14818/) (2021)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [On the Convergence of Adam and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09237/) (2019)
- [Simple Baselines for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06208/) (2018)
- [Label-Efficient Semantic Segmentation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03126/) (2021)
- [ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12484/) (2022)
- [DiffuSeq: Sequence to Sequence Text Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08933/) (2022)
- [Grad-TTS: A Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06337/) (2021)
- [Tracking without bells and whistles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05625/) (2019)
- [Analog Bits: Generating Discrete Data using Diffusion Models with Self-Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04202/) (2022)
- [DiffusionDet: Diffusion Model for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09788/) (2022)
- [RMPE: Regional Multi-person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00137/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Sora: A Review on Background, Technology, Limitations, and Opportunities of Large Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17177/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10647/) (2023)
- [Multi-agent Long-term 3D Human Pose Forecasting via Interaction-aware Trajectory Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05218/) (2024)
- [DPMesh: Exploiting Diffusion Prior for Occluded Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01424/) (2024)
- [HHMR: Holistic Hand Mesh Recovery by Enhancing the Multimodal Controllability of Graph Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01334/) (2024)
- [REWIND: Real-Time Egocentric Whole-Body Motion Diffusion with Exemplar-Based Identity Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04956/) (2025)
- [Open-Vocabulary 3D Semantic Segmentation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13642/) (2024)
- [Spectral Graphormer: Spectral Graph-based Transformer for Egocentric Two-Hand Reconstruction using Multi-View Color Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11015/) (2023)
- [HiPART: Hierarchical Pose AutoRegressive Transformer for Occluded 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23331/) (2025)
- [Human Pose-based Estimation, Tracking and Action Recognition with Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13039/) (2023)
- [SynFER: Towards Boosting Facial Expression Recognition with Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09865/) (2024)
- [CHAMP: Conformalized 3D Human Multi-Hypothesis Pose Estimators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06141/) (2024)
- [MoFM: A Large-Scale Human Motion Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05432/) (2025)
- [High-Resolution Spatiotemporal Modeling with Global-Local State Space Models for Video-Based Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11017/) (2025)
- [DiffusionVMR: Diffusion Model for Joint Video Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15109/) (2023)
- [Diffusion-Based Particle-DETR for BEV Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11578/) (2023)
- [Di2Pose: Discrete Diffusion Model for Occluded 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17016/) (2024)
- [PoseBench3D: A Cross-Dataset Analysis Framework for 3D Human Pose Estimation via Pose Lifting Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10888/) (2025)
- [DreamPose3D: Hallucinative Diffusion with Prompt Learning for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09502/) (2025)
- [HPE-CogVLM: Advancing Vision Language Models with a Head Pose Grounding Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01914/) (2024)
- [StarPose: 3D Human Pose Estimation via Spatial-Temporal Autoregressive Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02056/) (2025)
- [Gait Recognition via Collaborating Discriminative and Generative Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06245/) (2025)
- [End-to-End Multi-Person Pose Estimation with Pose-Aware Video Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13208/) (2025)
- [Video Generation Models Are Inherent Lighting Estimators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04674/) (2026)
- [Toward Efficient Generalization in 3D Human Pose Estimation via a Canonical Domain Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16146/) (2025)
- [Multi-Grained Feature Pruning for Video-Based Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05365/) (2025)
- [RadProPoser: Probabilistic Radar Tensor Human Pose Estimation That Knows Its Limits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03578/) (2025)
- [Cascaded Diffusion Framework for Probabilistic Coarse-to-Fine Hand Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00527/) (2025)
- [Point2Pose: A Generative Framework for 3D Human Pose Estimation with Multi-View Point Cloud Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10321/) (2025)
- [Garment Inertial Denoiser (GID): Endowing Accurate Motion Capture via Loose IMU Denoiser](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01360/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models that were initially proposed for realistic image generation have recently shown success in various perception tasks (e.g., object detection and image segmentation) and are increasingly gaining attention in computer vision. However, extending such models to multi-frame human pose estimation is non-trivial due to the presence of the additional temporal dimension in videos. More importantly, learning representations that focus on keypoint regions is crucial for accurate localization of human joints. Nevertheless, the adaptation of the diffusion-based methods remains unclear on how to achieve such objective. In this paper, we present DiffPose, a novel diffusion architecture that formulates video-based human pose estimation as a conditional heatmap generation problem. First, to better leverage temporal information, we propose SpatioTemporal Representation Learner which aggregates visual evidences across frames and uses the resulting features in each denoising step as a condition. In addition, we present a mechanism called Lookup-based MultiScale Feature Interaction that determines the correlations between local joints and global contexts across multiple scales. This mechanism generates delicate representations that focus on keypoint regions. Altogether, by extending diffusion models, we show two unique characteristics from DiffPose on pose estimation task: (i) the ability to combine multiple sets of pose estimates to improve prediction accuracy, particularly for challenging joints, and (ii) the ability to adjust the number of iterative steps for feature refinement without retraining the model. DiffPose sets new state-of-the-art results on three benchmarks: PoseTrack2017, PoseTrack2018, and PoseTrack21.