# POCO: 3D Pose and Shape Estimation with Confidence

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.12965 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12965/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 60 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [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)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [Density estimation using Real NVP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08803/) (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)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [PIFu: Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution Clothed Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05172/) (2019)
- [Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08128/) (2016)
- [Taskonomy: Disentangling Task Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08328/) (2018)
- [Learning to Reconstruct 3D Human Pose and Shape via Model-fitting in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12828/) (2019)
- [VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05656/) (2019)
- [Weight Uncertainty in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05424/) (2015)
- [Hollywood in Homes: Crowdsourcing Data Collection for Activity Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01753/) (2016)
- [PIFuHD: Multi-Level Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution 3D Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00452/) (2020)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)
- [Snapshot Ensembles: Train 1, get M for free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00109/) (2017)
- [PARE: Part Attention Regressor for 3D Human Body Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08527/) (2021)
- [Learning 3D Human Dynamics from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01601/) (2018)
- [HybrIK: A Hybrid Analytical-Neural Inverse Kinematics Solution for 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14672/) (2020)
- [ICON: Implicit Clothed humans Obtained from Normals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09127/) (2021)
- [Aleatoric uncertainty estimation with test-time augmentation for medical image segmentation with convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07356/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Convolutional Mesh Regression for Single-Image Human Shape Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03244/) (2019)
- [Mesh Graphormer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00272/) (2021)
- [Pose2Mesh: Graph Convolutional Network for 3D Human Pose and Mesh Recovery from a 2D Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09047/) (2020)
- [Total Capture: A 3D Deformation Model for Tracking Faces, Hands, and Bodies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01615/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [TokenHMR: Advancing Human Mesh Recovery with a Tokenized Pose Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16752/) (2024)
- [PICO: Reconstructing 3D People In Contact with Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17695/) (2025)
- [InteractVLM: 3D Interaction Reasoning from 2D Foundational Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05303/) (2025)
- [UPose3D: Uncertainty-Aware 3D Human Pose Estimation with Cross-View and Temporal Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14634/) (2024)
- [BodyShapeGPT: SMPL Body Shape Manipulation with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03556/) (2024)
- [CHAMP: Conformalized 3D Human Multi-Hypothesis Pose Estimators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06141/) (2024)
- [Weakly-Supervised 3D Hand Reconstruction with Knowledge Prior and Uncertainty Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12307/) (2024)
- [CondiMen: Conditional Multi-Person Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13058/) (2024)
- [Utilizing Uncertainty in 2D Pose Detectors for Probabilistic 3D Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16289/) (2024)
- [Kineo: Calibration-Free Metric Motion Capture From Sparse RGB Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24464/) (2025)
- [3D Kinematics Estimation from Video with a Biomechanical Model and Synthetic Training Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13172/) (2024)
- [CUPS: Improving Human Pose-Shape Estimators with Conformalized Deep Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10431/) (2024)
- [D-PoSE: Depth as an Intermediate Representation for 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04889/) (2024)
- [RadProPoser: Probabilistic Radar Tensor Human Pose Estimation That Knows Its Limits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03578/) (2025)
- [LieHMR: Autoregressive Human Mesh Recovery with SO(3) Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25739/) (2025)
- [LEXIS: LatEnt ProXimal Interaction Signatures for 3D HOI from an Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20800/) (2026)
- [RHINO: Reconstructing Human Interactions with Novel Objects from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17014/) (2026)
- [UST-Hand: An Uncertainty-aware Spatiotemporal Point Cloud Interaction Network for 3D Self-supervised Hand Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17742/) (2026)
- [B'ezier Degradation Modeling for LiDAR-based Human Motion Capture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19620/) (2026)
- [Reconstructing Humans and Objects in Interaction using Large Reconstruction Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27407/) (2026)
- [EgoWholeView: Camera-Only Head-Mounted Capture of Body and Bimanual Hand Motion for Embodied Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16256/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The regression of 3D Human Pose and Shape (HPS) from an image is becoming increasingly accurate. This makes the results useful for downstream tasks like human action recognition or 3D graphics. Yet, no regressor is perfect, and accuracy can be affected by ambiguous image evidence or by poses and appearance that are unseen during training. Most current HPS regressors, however, do not report the confidence of their outputs, meaning that downstream tasks cannot differentiate accurate estimates from inaccurate ones. To address this, we develop POCO, a novel framework for training HPS regressors to estimate not only a 3D human body, but also their confidence, in a single feed-forward pass. Specifically, POCO estimates both the 3D body pose and a per-sample variance. The key idea is to introduce a Dual Conditioning Strategy (DCS) for regressing uncertainty that is highly correlated to pose reconstruction quality. The POCO framework can be applied to any HPS regressor and here we evaluate it by modifying HMR, PARE, and CLIFF. In all cases, training the network to reason about uncertainty helps it learn to more accurately estimate 3D pose. While this was not our goal, the improvement is modest but consistent. Our main motivation is to provide uncertainty estimates for downstream tasks; we demonstrate this in two ways: (1) We use the confidence estimates to bootstrap HPS training. Given unlabelled image data, we take the confident estimates of a POCO-trained regressor as pseudo ground truth. Retraining with this automatically-curated data improves accuracy. (2) We exploit uncertainty in video pose estimation by automatically identifying uncertain frames (e.g. due to occlusion) and inpainting these from confident frames. Code and models will be available for research at https://poco.is.tue.mpg.de.