# AthletePose3D: A Benchmark Dataset for 3D Human Pose Estimation and Kinematic Validation in Athletic Movements

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.07499 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07499/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 60 of its 89 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2025.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08050/) (2016)
- [MediaPipe: A Framework for Building Perception Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08172/) (2019)
- [Simple Baselines for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06208/) (2018)
- [Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation In The Wild Using Improved CNN Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09813/) (2016)
- [AI Choreographer: Music Conditioned 3D Dance Generation with AIST++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08779/) (2021)
- [ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12484/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Effective Whole-body Pose Estimation with Two-stages Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15880/) (2023)
- [DeepPose: Human Pose Estimation via Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4659/) (2013)
- [3D Human Pose Estimation with Spatial and Temporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10455/) (2021)
- [HigherHRNet: Scale-Aware Representation Learning for Bottom-Up Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10357/) (2019)
- [MotionBERT: A Unified Perspective on Learning Human Motion Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06551/) (2022)
- [Focal Modulation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11926/) (2022)
- [UniFormer: Unified Transformer for Efficient Spatiotemporal Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04676/) (2022)
- [RTMPose: Real-Time Multi-Person Pose Estimation based on MMPose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07399/) (2023)
- [Learnable Triangulation of Human Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05754/) (2019)
- [MixSTE: Seq2seq Mixed Spatio-Temporal Encoder for 3D Human Pose Estimation in Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00859/) (2022)
- [MHFormer: Multi-Hypothesis Transformer for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12707/) (2021)
- [HRFormer: High-Resolution Transformer for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09408/) (2021)
- [More ConvNets in the 2020s: Scaling up Kernels Beyond 51x51 using Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03620/) (2022)
- [Joint Training of a Convolutional Network and a Graphical Model for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2984/) (2014)
- [TransPose: Keypoint Localization via Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14214/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Gen4D: Synthesizing Humans and Scenes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05397/) (2025)
- [Breaking Coordinate Overfitting: Geometry-Aware WiFi Sensing for Cross-Layout 3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12252/) (2026)
- [Multi-person Physics-based Pose Estimation for Combat Sports](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08175/) (2025)
- [CalTennis: Large Multi-View Tennis Video Dataset and Benchmark of Monocular-to-3D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20542/) (2026)
- [KASportsFormer: Kinematic Anatomy Enhanced Transformer for 3D Human Pose Estimation on Short Sports Scene Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20763/) (2025)
- [PRGCN: A Graph Memory Network for Cross-Sequence Pattern Reuse in 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19475/) (2025)
- [A Topology-Aware Graph Convolutional Network for Human Pose Similarity and Action Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01194/) (2025)
- [A Study on Real-time Object Detection using Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15926/) (2026)
- [CPU Optimization of a Monocular 3D Biomechanics Pipeline for Low-Resource Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15665/) (2026)
- [Mesh-Aware Epipolar Matching for Multi-View Multi-Person 3D Pose Estimation in Basketball](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29953/) (2026)
- [TaskNPoint: How to Teach Your Humanoid to Hit a Backhand in Minutes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26215/) (2026)
- [Markerless Pose Estimation for Resistance Training Technique Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.24384/) (2026)
- [MuyBridge: Mobile Human Center-of-Mass Estimation from Monocular Video via Sparse Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02854/) (2026)
- [Field Converter: Geometry-Initialized Temporal Residual Refinement for World-Grounded Player Pose Estimation from Soccer Broadcasts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.10498/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human pose estimation is a critical task in computer vision and sports biomechanics, with applications spanning sports science, rehabilitation, and biomechanical research. While significant progress has been made in monocular 3D pose estimation, current datasets often fail to capture the complex, high-acceleration movements typical of competitive sports. In this work, we introduce AthletePose3D, a novel dataset designed to address this gap. AthletePose3D includes 12 types of sports motions across various disciplines, with approximately 1.3 million frames and 165 thousand individual postures, specifically capturing high-speed, high-acceleration athletic movements. We evaluate state-of-the-art (SOTA) monocular 2D and 3D pose estimation models on the dataset, revealing that models trained on conventional datasets perform poorly on athletic motions. However, fine-tuning these models on AthletePose3D notably reduces the SOTA model mean per joint position error (MPJPE) from 214mm to 65mm-a reduction of over 69%. We also validate the kinematic accuracy of monocular pose estimations through waveform analysis, highlighting strong correlations in joint angle estimations but limitations in velocity estimation. Our work provides a comprehensive evaluation of monocular pose estimation models in the context of sports, contributing valuable insights for advancing monocular pose estimation techniques in high-performance sports environments. The dataset, code, and model checkpoints are available at: https://github.com/calvinyeungck/AthletePose3D