Pose estimation is remarkably successful under supervised learning, but obtaining annotations, especially for new deployments, is costly and time-consuming. This work tackles adapting models trained on synthetic data to real-world target domains with only unlabelled data. A common approach is model fine-tuning with pseudo-labels from the target domain; yet many pseudo-labelling strategies cannot provide sufficient high-quality pose labels. This work proposes a reconstruction-based strategy as a complement to pseudo-labelling for synthetic-to-real domain adaptation. We generate the driving image by geometrically transforming a base image according to the predicted keypoints and enforce a reconstruction loss to refine the predictions. It provides a novel solution to effectively correct confident yet inaccurate keypoint locations through image reconstruction in domain adaptation. Our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-arts by 8% for PCK on four large-scale hand and human real-world datasets. In particular, we excel on endpoints such as fingertips and head, with 7.2% and 29.9% improvements in PCK.

Studying the behavior of non-human primates is essential for gaining evolutionary insights (Langer-graber et al., 2012), conducting biomedical research (Schapiro et al., 2005), and improving animal

Heatmap regression has dominated human pose estimation due to its superior performance and strong generalization. To meet the requirements of traditional explicit neural networks for output form, existing heatmap-based methods discretize the originally continuous heatmap representation into 2D pixel arrays, which leads to performance degradation due to the introduction of quantization errors. This problem is significantly exacerbated as the size of the input image decreases, which makes heatmap-based methods not much better than coordinate regression on low-resolution images. In this paper, we propose a novel neural representation for human pose estimation called NerPE to achieve continuous heatmap regression. Given any position within the image range, NerPE regresses the corresponding confidence scores for body joints according to the surrounding image features, which guarantees continuity in space and confidence during training. Thanks to the decoupling from spatial resolution, NerPE can output the predicted heatmaps at arbitrary resolution during inference without retraining, which easily achieves sub-pixel localization precision. To reduce the computational cost, we design progressive coordinate decoding to cooperate with continuous heatmap regression, in which localization no longer requires the complete generation of high-resolution heatmaps.

The kinematics of human movements and locomotion are closely linked to the activation and contractions of muscles. To investigate this, we present a multimodal dataset with benchmarks collected using a novel pair of Intelligent Knee Sleeves (Texavie MarsWear Knee Sleeves) for human pose estimation. Our system utilizes synchronized datasets that comprise time-series data from the Knee Sleeves and the corresponding ground truth labels from visualized motion capture camera system. We employ these to generate 3D human models solely based on the wearable data of individuals performing different activities. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this camera-free system and machine learning algorithms in the assessment of various movements and exercises, including extension to unseen exercises and individuals. The results show an average error of 7.21 degrees across all eight lower body joints when compared to the ground truth, indicating the effectiveness and reliability of the Knee Sleeve system for the prediction of different lower body joints beyond knees. The results enable human pose estimation in a seamless manner without being limited by visual occlusion or the field of view of cameras. Our results show the potential of multimodal wearable sensing in a variety of applications from home fitness to sports, healthcare, and physical rehabilitation focusing on pose and movement estimation.

Synthetic visual data can provide practicically infinite diversity and rich labels, while avoiding ethical issues with privacy and bias. However, for many tasks, current models trained on synthetic data generalize poorly to real data. The task of 3D human pose estimation is a particularly interesting example of this sim2real problem, because learning-based approaches perform reasonably well given real training data, yet labeled 3D poses are extremely difficult to obtain in the wild, limiting scalability. In this paper, we show that standard neural-network approaches, which perform poorly when trained on synthetic RGB images, can perform well when the data is pre-processed to extract cues about the person's motion, notably as optical flow and the motion of 2D keypoints. Therefore, our results suggest that motion can be a simple way to bridge a sim2real gap when video is available. We evaluate on the 3D Poses in the Wild dataset, the most challenging modern benchmark for 3D pose estimation, where we show full 3D mesh recovery that is on par with state-of-the-art methods trained on real 3D sequences, despite training only on synthetic humans from the SURREAL dataset.

However, existing solutions which mainly rely on cameras and wearable devices are either privacy intrusive or inconvenient to use. To address these issues, wireless sensing has emerged as a promising alternative, leveraging LiDAR, mmWave radar, and WiFi signals for device-free human sensing. In this paper, we propose MM-Fi, the first multi-modal non-intrusive 4D human dataset with 27 daily or rehabilitation action categories, to bridge the gap between wireless sensing and high-level human perception tasks. MM-Fi consists of over 320k synchronized frames of five modalities from 40 human subjects. Various annotations are provided to support potential sensing tasks, e.g., human pose estimation and action recognition. Extensive experiments have been conducted to compare the sensing capacity of each or several modalities in terms of multiple tasks. We envision that MM-Fi can contribute to wireless sensing research with respect to action recognition, human pose estimation, multi-modal learning, cross-modal supervision, and interdisciplinary healthcare research.

Lifting based 3D human pose estimators infer 3D joints from 2D keypoints, but often struggle to generalize to real world settings with noisy 2D detections. We revisit the input to lifting and propose AugLift, a simple augmentation of standard lifting that enriches each 2D keypoint (x, y) with an Uncertainty Aware Depth Descriptor (UADD). We run a single off the shelf monocular depth estimator to obtain a depth map, and for every keypoint with detector confidence c we extract depth statistics from its confidence scaled neighborhood, forming a compact, interpretable UADD (c, d, d_min, d_max) that captures both local geometry and reliability. AugLift is modular, requires no new sensors or architectural changes, and integrates by expanding the input layer of existing lifting models. Across four datasets and four lifting architectures, AugLift boosts cross dataset (out of distribution) performance on unseen data by an average of 10.1 percent, while also improving in distribution performance by 4.0 percent as measured by MPJPE. A post hoc analysis clarifies when and why it helps: gains are largest on novel poses and significantly occluded joints, where depth statistics resolve front back ambiguities while confidence calibrates the spatial neighborhoods from which they are drawn. We also study interaction with recent image feature lifting methods and find the signals are complementary: adding UADD to image conditioned lifting yields both ID and OOD gains. A learned depth feature extension (AugLiftV2) improves performance further while trading off interpretability. Together, these results indicate that lightweight, confidence aware depth cues are a powerful plug in for robust 2D to 3D pose lifting.

Human pose estimation focuses on predicting body keypoints to analyze human motion. Event cameras provide high temporal resolution and low latency, enabling robust estimation under challenging conditions. However, most existing methods convert event streams into dense event frames, which adds extra computation and sacrifices the high temporal resolution of the event signal. In this work, we aim to exploit the spatiotemporal properties of event streams based on point cloud-based framework, designed to enhance human pose estimation performance. We design Event Temporal Slicing Convolution module to capture short-term dependencies across event slices, and combine it with Event Slice Sequencing module for structured temporal modeling. We also apply edge enhancement in point cloud-based event representation to enhance spatial edge information under sparse event conditions to further improve performance. Experiments on the DHP19 dataset show our proposed method consistently improves performance across three representative point cloud backbones: PointNet, DGCNN, and Point Transformer.