# D-PoSE: Depth as an Intermediate Representation for 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.04889 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04889/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [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)
- [End-to-end Recovery of Human Shape and Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06584/) (2017)
- [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)
- [VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05656/) (2019)
- [DensePose: Dense Human Pose Estimation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00434/) (2018)
- [Albumentations: fast and flexible image augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.06839/) (2018)
- [PIFuHD: Multi-Level Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution 3D Human Digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00452/) (2020)
- [ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12484/) (2022)
- [Neural 3D Mesh Renderer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07566/) (2017)
- [End-to-End Human Pose and Mesh Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09760/) (2020)
- [Learning from Synthetic Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.01370/) (2017)
- [Humans in 4D: Reconstructing and Tracking Humans with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20091/) (2023)
- [PARE: Part Attention Regressor for 3D Human Body Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08527/) (2021)
- [HybrIK: A Hybrid Analytical-Neural Inverse Kinematics Solution for 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14672/) (2020)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation with Spatial and Temporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10455/) (2021)
- [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)
- [HigherHRNet: Scale-Aware Representation Learning for Bottom-Up Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10357/) (2019)
- [CLIFF: Carrying Location Information in Full Frames into Human Pose and Shape Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00571/) (2022)
- [BEDLAM: A Synthetic Dataset of Bodies Exhibiting Detailed Lifelike Animated Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16940/) (2023)
- [Monocular, One-stage, Regression of Multiple 3D People](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12272/) (2020)
- [Unite the People: Closing the Loop Between 3D and 2D Human Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.02468/) (2017)
- [AGORA: Avatars in Geography Optimized for Regression Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14643/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Ice Hockey Puck Localization Using Contextual Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04365/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present D-PoSE (Depth as an Intermediate Representation for 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation), a one-stage method that estimates human pose and SMPL-X shape parameters from a single RGB image. Recent works use larger models with transformer backbones and decoders to improve the accuracy in human pose and shape (HPS) benchmarks. D-PoSE proposes a vision based approach that uses the estimated human depth-maps as an intermediate representation for HPS and leverages training with synthetic data and the ground-truth depth-maps provided with them for depth supervision during training. Although trained on synthetic datasets, D-PoSE achieves state-of-the-art performance on the real-world benchmark datasets, EMDB and 3DPW. Despite its simple lightweight design and the CNN backbone, it outperforms ViT-based models that have a number of parameters that is larger by almost an order of magnitude. D-PoSE code is available at: https://github.com/nvasilik/D-PoSE