Lifting 2D Human Pose to 3D with Domain Adapted 3D Body Concept

Lifting the 2D human pose to the 3D pose is an important yet challenging task. Existing 3D human pose estimation suffers from (1) the inherent ambiguity between the 2D and 3D data, and (2) the lack of well-labeled 2D–3D pose pairs in the wild. Human beings are able to imagine the 3D human pose from a 2D image or a set of 2D body key-points with the least ambiguity, which should be attributed to the prior knowledge of the human body that we have acquired in our mind. Inspired by this, we propose a new framework that leverages the labeled 3D human poses to learn a 3D concept of the human body to reduce ambiguity. To have consensus on the body concept from the 2D pose, our key insight is to treat the 2D human pose and the 3D human pose as two different domains. By adapting the two domains, the body knowledge learned from 3D poses is applied to 2D poses and guides the 2D pose encoder to generate informative 3D “imagination” as an embedding in pose lifting. Benefiting from the domain adaptation perspective, the proposed framework unifies the supervised and semi-supervised 3D pose estimation in a principled framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks. More importantly, it is validated that the explicitly learned 3D body concept effectively alleviates the 2D–3D ambiguity, improves the generalization, and enables the network to leverage the abundant unlabeled 2D data.