# PoseGen: Learning to Generate 3D Human Pose Dataset with NeRF

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.14915 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14915/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)
- [Learning from Synthetic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01370/) (2017)
- [HybrIK: A Hybrid Analytical-Neural Inverse Kinematics Solution for 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14672/) (2020)
- [CLIFF: Carrying Location Information in Full Frames into Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00571/) (2022)
- [A-NeRF: Articulated Neural Radiance Fields for Learning Human Shape, Appearance, and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06199/) (2021)
- [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)
- [PyMAF-X: Towards Well-aligned Full-body Model Regression from Monocular Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06400/) (2022)
- [Putting People in their Place: Monocular Regression of 3D People in Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08274/) (2021)
- [DenseRaC: Joint 3D Pose and Shape Estimation by Dense Render-and-Compare](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00116/) (2019)
- [Cascaded deep monocular 3D human pose estimation with evolutionary training data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07778/) (2020)
- [Learning Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation from Multi-view Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04775/) (2018)
- [Moulding Humans: Non-parametric 3D Human Shape Estimation from Single Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00439/) (2019)
- [CanonPose: Self-Supervised Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14679/) (2020)
- [Learning to Estimate Robust 3D Human Mesh from In-the-Wild Crowded Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07300/) (2021)
- [Delving Deep Into Hybrid Annotations for 3D Human Recovery in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06442/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Parametric Pose Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04203/) (2021)
- [MoCap-guided Data Augmentation for 3D Pose Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02046/) (2016)
- [AdaptPose: Cross-Dataset Adaptation for 3D Human Pose Estimation by Learnable Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11593/) (2021)
- [PoseExaminer: Automated Testing of Out-of-Distribution Robustness in Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07337/) (2023)
- [Capturing the motion of every joint: 3D human pose and shape estimation with independent tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00298/) (2023)
- [Implicit 3D Human Mesh Recovery using Consistency with Pose and Shape from Unseen-view](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17651/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Spatial Reasoning with Vision-Language Models in Ego-Centric Multi-View Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06266/) (2025)
- [PoseSyn: Synthesizing Diverse 3D Pose Data from In-the-Wild 2D Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13025/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper proposes an end-to-end framework for generating 3D human pose datasets using Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). Public datasets generally have limited diversity in terms of human poses and camera viewpoints, largely due to the resource-intensive nature of collecting 3D human pose data. As a result, pose estimators trained on public datasets significantly underperform when applied to unseen out-of-distribution samples. Previous works proposed augmenting public datasets by generating 2D-3D pose pairs or rendering a large amount of random data. Such approaches either overlook image rendering or result in suboptimal datasets for pre-trained models. Here we propose PoseGen, which learns to generate a dataset (human 3D poses and images) with a feedback loss from a given pre-trained pose estimator. In contrast to prior art, our generated data is optimized to improve the robustness of the pre-trained model. The objective of PoseGen is to learn a distribution of data that maximizes the prediction error of a given pre-trained model. As the learned data distribution contains OOD samples of the pre-trained model, sampling data from such a distribution for further fine-tuning a pre-trained model improves the generalizability of the model. This is the first work that proposes NeRFs for 3D human data generation. NeRFs are data-driven and do not require 3D scans of humans. Therefore, using NeRF for data generation is a new direction for convenient user-specific data generation. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed PoseGen improves two baseline models (SPIN and HybrIK) on four datasets with an average 6% relative improvement.