# Geometry-Conditioned Diffusion for Occlusion-Robust In-Bed Pose Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.23651 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23651/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in 3D, point cloud and scene generation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 18 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [3D, point cloud and scene generation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/3d-point-cloud-and-scene-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [OpenPose: Realtime Multi-Person 2D Pose Estimation using Part Affinity Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08008/) (2018)
- [Stacked Hourglass Networks for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06937/) (2016)
- [A Survey on Generative Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02646/) (2022)
- [BBDM: Image-to-image Translation with Brownian Bridge Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07680/) (2022)
- [Image-to-Image Translation: Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08629/) (2021)
- [YOLO-Pose: Enhancing YOLO for Multi Person Pose Estimation Using Object Keypoint Similarity Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06806/) (2022)
- [UVCGAN: UNet Vision Transformer cycle-consistent GAN for unpaired image-to-image translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02557/) (2022)
- [Multimodal In-bed Pose and Shape Estimation under the Blankets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06735/) (2020)
- [Anatomy-guided domain adaptation for 3D in-bed human pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12193/) (2022)
- [In-Bed Human Pose Estimation from Unseen and Privacy-Preserving Image Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15124/) (2021)
- [Towards Accurate Cross-Domain In-Bed Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03578/) (2021)
- [Privacy-Preserving In-Bed Pose Monitoring: A Fusion and Reconstruction Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10704/) (2022)
- [Estimating Pose from Pressure Data for Smart Beds with Deep Image-based Pose Estimators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06518/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Robust in-bed human pose estimation under blanket occlusion remains challenging due to the scarcity of reliable labeled training data for heavily covered poses. Existing approaches rely on multi-modal sensing or image-to-image translation frameworks that remain conditioned on visible source imagery, limiting scalability and pose diversity. In this work, we reformulate occlusion-aware augmentation as a geometry-conditioned generative modeling task. We conduct a systematic comparison of deterministic masking, unpaired translation, paired diffusion-based translation, and a proposed pose-conditioned Latent Diffusion Model (Pose-LDM). Unlike image-guided methods, Pose-LDM synthesizes blanket-covered images directly from skeletal keypoints, eliminating dependence on paired supervision and pixel-level source-image conditioning while enabling generation from arbitrary pose inputs. All augmentation strategies are evaluated through their impact on downstream pose estimation under a fixed backbone. Pose- LDM achieves the highest strict localization accuracy under severe occlusion while maintaining overall detection performance comparable to paired diffusion models, approaching the performance of fully supervised training. These results demonstrate that geometry-conditioned diffusion provides an effective and supervision-efficient pathway toward occlusion-robust inbed pose estimation without modifying the sensing pipeline. The code is available at: github.com/navidTerraNova/ GeoDiffPose.