# AthleticsPose: Authentic Sports Motion Dataset on Athletic Field and Evaluation of Monocular 3D Pose Estimation Ability

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12905 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12905/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [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)
- [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)
- [HigherHRNet: Scale-Aware Representation Learning for Bottom-Up Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10357/) (2019)
- [Bottom-Up Human Pose Estimation Via Disentangled Keypoint Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02300/) (2021)
- [MotionAGFormer: Enhancing 3D Human Pose Estimation with a Transformer-GCNFormer Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16288/) (2023)
- [MogaNet: Multi-order Gated Aggregation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03295/) (2022)
- [SportsPose -- A Dynamic 3D sports pose dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01865/) (2023)
- [AutoSoccerPose: Automated 3D posture Analysis of Soccer Shot Movements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12070/) (2024)
- [3D Pose-Based Temporal Action Segmentation for Figure Skating: A Fine-Grained and Jump Procedure-Aware Annotation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16638/) (2024)
- [Automatic Edge Error Judgment in Figure Skating Using 3D Pose Estimation from a Monocular Camera and IMUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17193/) (2023)
- [Early Detection of Injuries in MLB Pitchers from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08916/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Towards Athlete Fatigue Assessment from Association Football Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05636/) (2026)
- [SoccerNet 2026 Challenges Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07320/) (2026)
- [VIFSS: View-Invariant and Figure Skating-Specific Pose Representation Learning for Temporal Action Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10281/) (2025)
- [SeDa: A Unified System for Dataset Discovery and Multi-Entity Augmented Semantic Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07502/) (2026)
- [Mesh-Aware Epipolar Matching for Multi-View Multi-Person 3D Pose Estimation in Basketball](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29953/) (2026)
- [HSTGFormer: Hyper Spatial-Temporal Graph Transformer for 3D Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12187/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Monocular 3D pose estimation is a promising, flexible alternative to costly motion capture systems for sports analysis. However, its practical application is hindered by two factors: a lack of realistic sports datasets and unclear reliability for sports tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce the AthleticsPose dataset, a new public dataset featuring ``real'' motions captured from 23 athletes performing various athletics events on an athletic field. Using this dataset, we trained a representative 3D pose estimation model and performed a comprehensive evaluation. Our results show that the model trained on AthleticsPose significantly outperforms a baseline model trained on an imitated sports motion dataset, reducing MPJPE by approximately 75 %. These results show the importance of training on authentic sports motion data, as models based on imitated motions do not effectively transfer to real-world motions. Further analysis reveals that estimation accuracy is sensitive to camera view and subject scale. In case studies of kinematic indicators, the model demonstrated the potential to capture individual differences in knee angles but struggled with higher-speed metrics, such as knee-drive velocity, due to prediction biases. This work provides the research community with a valuable dataset and clarifies the potential and practical limitations of using monocular 3D pose estimation for sports motion analysis. Our dataset, code, and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/SZucchini/AthleticsPose.