# MAEPose: Self-Supervised Spatiotemporal Learning for Human Pose Estimation on mmWave Video

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00242 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00242/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [VideoMAE V2: Scaling Video Masked Autoencoders with Dual Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16727/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Model is a Good Pose Estimator from 3D RF-Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16198/) (2024)
- [A Survey of mmWave-based Human Sensing: Technology, Platform and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03149/) (2023)
- [CubeDN: Real-time Drone Detection in 3D Space from Dual mmWave Radar Cubes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17831/) (2025)

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

- [Wave2Body: Rethinking mmWave Human Pose Estimation as Radar-to-Body Token Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18875/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Millimetre-wave (mmWave) radar offers a more privacy-preserving alternative to RGB-based human pose estimation. However, existing methods typically rely on pre-extracted intermediate representations such as sparse point clouds or spectrogram images, where the rich spatiotemporal information naturally present in radar video streams is discarded for model learning, while such signal processing adds system complexity. In addition, existing solutions are mainly conducted in an end-to-end supervised manner without leveraging unlabelled raw video streams to learn generalized representations. In this study, we present MAEPose, a masked autoencoding-based human pose estimation approach that operates directly on mmWave spectrogram videos. MAEPose learns spatiotemporal motion-aware generalized representations from unlabelled radar video, and leverages its heatmap decoder for multi-frame pose estimation predictions. We evaluate it across three datasets based on leave-one-person-out cross-validation with rigorous statistical testing. MAEPose consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by up to 22.1% in MPJPE p<0.05, and maintains robust accuracy under zero-shot bystander interference with only a 6.5% error increase. Ablation studies confirm that both the pre-training and the heatmap decoder contribute substantially, while modality analysis indicates that leveraging Range-Doppler video as input achieves better pose estimation performance than Range-Azimuth or their fusion, with lower computational cost.