# Occlusion Handling in 3D Human Pose Estimation with Perturbed Positional Encoding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.17397 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17397/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [How Powerful are Graph Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00826/) (2018)
- [Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01212/) (2017)
- [Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07455/) (2018)
- [Spectral Networks and Locally Connected Networks on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6203/) (2013)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [Weisfeiler and Leman Go Neural: Higher-order Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02244/) (2018)
- [Link Prediction Based on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09691/) (2018)
- [A Generalization of Transformer Networks to Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09699/) (2020)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)
- [3D human pose estimation in video with temporal convolutions and semi-supervised training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11742/) (2018)
- [A simple yet effective baseline for 3d human pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03098/) (2017)
- [Invariant and Equivariant Graph Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.09902/) (2018)
- [Cascaded Pyramid Network for Multi-Person Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07319/) (2017)
- [VITON: An Image-based Virtual Try-on Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08447/) (2017)
- [Coarse-to-Fine Volumetric Prediction for Single-Image 3D Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07828/) (2016)
- [Weisfeiler and Lehman Go Topological: Message Passing Simplicial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03212/) (2021)
- [Semantic Graph Convolutional Networks for 3D Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03345/) (2019)
- [Random Features Strengthen Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.03155/) (2020)
- [Sign and Basis Invariant Networks for Spectral Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13013/) (2022)
- [Equivariant Subgraph Aggregation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02910/) (2021)
- [Compositional Human Pose Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00159/) (2017)
- [Towards 3D Human Pose Estimation in the Wild: a Weakly-supervised Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.02447/) (2017)
- [2D/3D Pose Estimation and Action Recognition using Multitask Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09232/) (2018)
- [Graph Stacked Hourglass Networks for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16385/) (2021)
- [Generating Multiple Hypotheses for 3D Human Pose Estimation with Mixture Density Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05547/) (2019)
- [Exploiting temporal information for 3D pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08585/) (2017)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation in the Wild by Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09722/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [FMPose3D: monocular 3D pose estimation via flow matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05755/) (2026)
- [NanoHTNet: Nano Human Topology Network for Efficient 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15763/) (2025)
- [CIGPose: Causal Intervention Graph Neural Network for Whole-Body Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09418/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding human behavior fundamentally relies on accurate 3D human pose estimation. Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have recently shown promising advancements, delivering state-of-the-art performance with rather lightweight architectures. In the context of graph-structured data, leveraging the eigenvectors of the graph Laplacian matrix for positional encoding is effective. Yet, the approach does not specify how to handle scenarios where edges in the input graph are missing. To this end, we propose a novel positional encoding technique, PerturbPE, that extracts consistent and regular components from the eigenbasis. Our method involves applying multiple perturbations and taking their average to extract the consistent and regular component from the eigenbasis. PerturbPE leverages the Rayleigh-Schrodinger Perturbation Theorem (RSPT) for calculating the perturbed eigenvectors. Employing this labeling technique enhances the robustness and generalizability of the model. Our results support our theoretical findings, e.g. our experimental analysis observed a performance enhancement of up to 12% on the Human3.6M dataset in instances where occlusion resulted in the absence of one edge. Furthermore, our novel approach significantly enhances performance in scenarios where two edges are missing, setting a new benchmark for state-of-the-art.