# SimpleEgo: Predicting Probabilistic Body Pose from Egocentric Cameras

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.14785 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14785/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [Expressive Body Capture: 3D Hands, Face, and Body from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05866/) (2019)
- [On the Continuity of Rotation Representations in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07035/) (2018)
- [Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08128/) (2016)
- [Learning to Reconstruct 3D Human Pose and Shape via Model-fitting in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12828/) (2019)
- [A simple yet effective baseline for 3d human pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03098/) (2017)
- [Learning to Estimate 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Color Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04092/) (2018)
- [Fake It Till You Make It: Face analysis in the wild using synthetic data alone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15102/) (2021)
- [Neural Body Fitting: Unifying Deep Learning and Model-Based Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05942/) (2018)
- [Monocular Expressive Body Regression through Body-Driven Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09062/) (2020)
- [Probabilistic Modeling for Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11944/) (2021)
- [BodyNet: Volumetric Inference of 3D Human Body Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04875/) (2018)
- [Compositional Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00159/) (2017)
- [AvatarPoser: Articulated Full-Body Pose Tracking from Sparse Motion Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13784/) (2022)
- [Generating Multiple Hypotheses for 3D Human Pose Estimation with Mixture Density Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05547/) (2019)
- [Synthetic Training for Accurate 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10013/) (2020)
- [xR-EgoPose: Egocentric 3D Human Pose from an HMD Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10045/) (2019)
- [QuestSim: Human Motion Tracking from Sparse Sensors with Simulated Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09391/) (2022)
- [3D face reconstruction with dense landmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02776/) (2022)
- [Mo2Cap2: Real-time Mobile 3D Motion Capture with a Cap-mounted Fisheye Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05959/) (2018)
- [Monocular Human Pose Estimation: A Survey of Deep Learning-based Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.01423/) (2020)
- [UnrealEgo: A New Dataset for Robust Egocentric 3D Human Motion Capture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01633/) (2022)
- [FLAG: Flow-based 3D Avatar Generation from Sparse Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05789/) (2022)
- [SelfPose: 3D Egocentric Pose Estimation from a Headset Mounted Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01519/) (2020)
- [Hierarchical Kinematic Probability Distributions for 3D Human Shape and Pose Estimation from Images in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00990/) (2021)
- [Structured Prediction of 3D Human Pose with Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.05180/) (2016)
- [Maximum-Margin Structured Learning with Deep Networks for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.06708/) (2015)
- [Probabilistic orientation estimation with matrix Fisher distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09740/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [EgoChoir: Capturing 3D Human-Object Interaction Regions from Egocentric Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13659/) (2024)
- [The Invisible EgoHand: 3D Hand Forecasting through EgoBody Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08654/) (2025)
- [REWIND: Real-Time Egocentric Whole-Body Motion Diffusion with Exemplar-Based Identity Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04956/) (2025)
- [EMHI: A Multimodal Egocentric Human Motion Dataset with HMD and Body-Worn IMUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17168/) (2024)
- [A Survey on 3D Egocentric Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17893/) (2024)
- [Bring Your Rear Cameras for Egocentric 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11652/) (2025)
- [FRAME: Floor-aligned Representation for Avatar Motion from Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23094/) (2025)
- [Event-based Egocentric Human Pose Estimation in Dynamic Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22007/) (2025)
- [Prime and Reach: Synthesising Body Motion for Gaze-Primed Object Reach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16456/) (2025)
- [Egocentric Visibility-Aware Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23618/) (2026)
- [Human Motion Estimation with Everyday Wearables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21209/) (2025)
- [EgoPoseVR: Spatiotemporal Multi-Modal Reasoning for Egocentric Full-Body Pose in Virtual Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05590/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Our work addresses the problem of egocentric human pose estimation from downwards-facing cameras on head-mounted devices (HMD). This presents a challenging scenario, as parts of the body often fall outside of the image or are occluded. Previous solutions minimize this problem by using fish-eye camera lenses to capture a wider view, but these can present hardware design issues. They also predict 2D heat-maps per joint and lift them to 3D space to deal with self-occlusions, but this requires large network architectures which are impractical to deploy on resource-constrained HMDs. We predict pose from images captured with conventional rectilinear camera lenses. This resolves hardware design issues, but means body parts are often out of frame. As such, we directly regress probabilistic joint rotations represented as matrix Fisher distributions for a parameterized body model. This allows us to quantify pose uncertainties and explain out-of-frame or occluded joints. This also removes the need to compute 2D heat-maps and allows for simplified DNN architectures which require less compute. Given the lack of egocentric datasets using rectilinear camera lenses, we introduce the SynthEgo dataset, a synthetic dataset with 60K stereo images containing high diversity of pose, shape, clothing and skin tone. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results for this challenging configuration, reducing mean per-joint position error by 23% overall and 58% for the lower body. Our architecture also has eight times fewer parameters and runs twice as fast as the current state-of-the-art. Experiments show that training on our synthetic dataset leads to good generalization to real world images without fine-tuning.