Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Liang, Shuang, He, Jing, Wang, Chuanmeizhi, Liao, Lejun, Zhang, Guo, Chen, Yingcong, Yuan, Yuan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24980
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910051211411456
author Liang, Shuang
He, Jing
Wang, Chuanmeizhi
Liao, Lejun
Zhang, Guo
Chen, Yingcong
Yuan, Yuan
author_facet Liang, Shuang
He, Jing
Wang, Chuanmeizhi
Liao, Lejun
Zhang, Guo
Chen, Yingcong
Yuan, Yuan
contents Pre-trained diffusion models provide rich latent features across U-Net levels and are emerging as powerful vision backbones. While prior works such as Marigold and Lotus repurpose diffusion priors for dense geometric perception tasks such as depth and surface normal estimation, their potential for cross-domain human pose estimation remains largely unexplored. Through a systematic analysis of latent features from different upsampling levels of the Stable Diffusion U-Net, we identify the levels that deliver the strongest robustness and cross-domain generalization for pose estimation. Building on these findings, we propose \textbf{SDPose}, which (i) extracts U-Net features from the selected upsampling blocks, (ii) fuses them with a lightweight feature aggregation module to form a robust representation, and (iii) jointly optimizes keypoint heatmap supervision with an auxiliary latent reconstruction loss to regularize training and preserve the pre-trained generative prior. To evaluate cross-domain generalization and robustness, we construct COCO-OOD, a COCO-based benchmark with four subsets: three style-transferred splits to assess domain shift, and one corruption split (noise, weather, digital artifacts, and blur) to test robustness. With a shorter fine-tuning schedule, SDPose achieves performance comparable to Sapiens on COCO, surpasses Sapiens-1B on COCO-WholeBody, and establishes new state-of-the-art results on HumanArt and COCO-OOD.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_24980
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SDPose: Exploiting Diffusion Priors for Out-of-Domain and Robust Pose Estimation
Liang, Shuang
He, Jing
Wang, Chuanmeizhi
Liao, Lejun
Zhang, Guo
Chen, Yingcong
Yuan, Yuan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Pre-trained diffusion models provide rich latent features across U-Net levels and are emerging as powerful vision backbones. While prior works such as Marigold and Lotus repurpose diffusion priors for dense geometric perception tasks such as depth and surface normal estimation, their potential for cross-domain human pose estimation remains largely unexplored. Through a systematic analysis of latent features from different upsampling levels of the Stable Diffusion U-Net, we identify the levels that deliver the strongest robustness and cross-domain generalization for pose estimation. Building on these findings, we propose \textbf{SDPose}, which (i) extracts U-Net features from the selected upsampling blocks, (ii) fuses them with a lightweight feature aggregation module to form a robust representation, and (iii) jointly optimizes keypoint heatmap supervision with an auxiliary latent reconstruction loss to regularize training and preserve the pre-trained generative prior. To evaluate cross-domain generalization and robustness, we construct COCO-OOD, a COCO-based benchmark with four subsets: three style-transferred splits to assess domain shift, and one corruption split (noise, weather, digital artifacts, and blur) to test robustness. With a shorter fine-tuning schedule, SDPose achieves performance comparable to Sapiens on COCO, surpasses Sapiens-1B on COCO-WholeBody, and establishes new state-of-the-art results on HumanArt and COCO-OOD.
title SDPose: Exploiting Diffusion Priors for Out-of-Domain and Robust Pose Estimation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24980