3D Human Pose Estimation via Deep Learning from 2D Annotations

We propose a deep convolutional neural network for 3D human pose and camera estimation from monocular images that learns from 2D joint annotations. The proposed network follows the typical architecture, but contains an additional output layer which projects predicted 3D joints onto 2D, and enforces constraints on body part lengths in 3D. We further enforce pose constraints using an independently trained network that learns a prior distribution over 3D poses. We evaluate our approach on several benchmark datasets and compare against state-of-the-art approaches for 3D human pose estimation, achieving comparable performance. Additionally, we show that our approach significantly outperforms other methods in cases where 3D ground truth data is unavailable, and that our network exhibits good generalization properties.