DiffPose: Toward More Reliable 3D Pose Estimation

Monocular 3D human pose estimation is quite challenging due to the inherent ambiguity and occlusion, which often lead to high uncertainty and indeterminacy. On the other hand, diffusion models have recently emerged as an effective tool for generating high-quality images from noise. Inspired by their capability, we explore a novel pose estimation framework (DiffPose) that formulates 3D pose estimation as a reverse diffusion process. We incorporate novel designs into our DiffPose to facilitate the diffusion process for 3D pose estimation: a pose-specific initialization of pose uncertainty distributions, a Gaussian Mixture Model-based forward diffusion process, and a context-conditioned reverse diffusion process. Our proposed DiffPose significantly outperforms existing methods on the widely used pose estimation benchmarks Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP. Project page: https://gongjia0208.github.io/Diffpose/.

PDF Abstract CVPR 2023 PDF CVPR 2023 Abstract
Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
3D Human Pose Estimation Human3.6M DiffPose Average MPJPE (mm) 36.9 # 61
3D Human Pose Estimation MPI-INF-3DHP DiffPose AUC 75.9 # 12
MPJPE 29.1 # 11
PCK 98 # 9

Methods