Flexible Geometric Guidance for Probabilistic Human Pose Estimation with Diffusion Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Snelgar, Francis, Xu, Ming, Gould, Stephen, Zheng, Liang, Asthana, Akshay
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Snelgar, Francis
Xu, Ming
Gould, Stephen
Zheng, Liang
Asthana, Akshay
author_facet Snelgar, Francis
Xu, Ming
Gould, Stephen
Zheng, Liang
Asthana, Akshay
contents 3D human pose estimation from 2D images is a challenging problem due to depth ambiguity and occlusion. Because of these challenges the task is underdetermined, where there exists multiple -- possibly infinite -- poses that are plausible given the image. Despite this, many prior works assume the existence of a deterministic mapping and estimate a single pose given an image. Furthermore, methods based on machine learning require a large amount of paired 2D-3D data to train and suffer from generalization issues to unseen scenarios. To address both of these issues, we propose a framework for pose estimation using diffusion models, which enables sampling from a probability distribution over plausible poses which are consistent with a 2D image. Our approach falls under the guidance framework for conditional generation, and guides samples from an unconditional diffusion model, trained only on 3D data, using the gradients of the heatmaps from a 2D keypoint detector. We evaluate our method on the Human 3.6M dataset under best-of-$m$ multiple hypothesis evaluation, showing state-of-the-art performance among methods which do not require paired 2D-3D data for training. We additionally evaluate the generalization ability using the MPI-INF-3DHP and 3DPW datasets and demonstrate competitive performance. Finally, we demonstrate the flexibility of our framework by using it for novel tasks including pose generation and pose completion, without the need to train bespoke conditional models. We make code available at https://github.com/fsnelgar/diffusion_pose .
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_03126
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Flexible Geometric Guidance for Probabilistic Human Pose Estimation with Diffusion Models
Snelgar, Francis
Xu, Ming
Gould, Stephen
Zheng, Liang
Asthana, Akshay
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
3D human pose estimation from 2D images is a challenging problem due to depth ambiguity and occlusion. Because of these challenges the task is underdetermined, where there exists multiple -- possibly infinite -- poses that are plausible given the image. Despite this, many prior works assume the existence of a deterministic mapping and estimate a single pose given an image. Furthermore, methods based on machine learning require a large amount of paired 2D-3D data to train and suffer from generalization issues to unseen scenarios. To address both of these issues, we propose a framework for pose estimation using diffusion models, which enables sampling from a probability distribution over plausible poses which are consistent with a 2D image. Our approach falls under the guidance framework for conditional generation, and guides samples from an unconditional diffusion model, trained only on 3D data, using the gradients of the heatmaps from a 2D keypoint detector. We evaluate our method on the Human 3.6M dataset under best-of-$m$ multiple hypothesis evaluation, showing state-of-the-art performance among methods which do not require paired 2D-3D data for training. We additionally evaluate the generalization ability using the MPI-INF-3DHP and 3DPW datasets and demonstrate competitive performance. Finally, we demonstrate the flexibility of our framework by using it for novel tasks including pose generation and pose completion, without the need to train bespoke conditional models. We make code available at https://github.com/fsnelgar/diffusion_pose .
title Flexible Geometric Guidance for Probabilistic Human Pose Estimation with Diffusion Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03126