Mask as Supervision: Leveraging Unified Mask Information for Unsupervised 3D Pose Estimation

Automatic estimation of 3D human pose from monocular RGB images is a challenging and unsolved problem in computer vision. In a supervised manner, approaches heavily rely on laborious annotations and present hampered generalization ability due to the limited diversity of 3D pose datasets. To address these challenges, we propose a unified framework that leverages mask as supervision for unsupervised 3D pose estimation. With general unsupervised segmentation algorithms, the proposed model employs skeleton and physique representations that exploit accurate pose information from coarse to fine. Compared with previous unsupervised approaches, we organize the human skeleton in a fully unsupervised way which enables the processing of annotation-free data and provides ready-to-use estimation results. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate our state-of-the-art pose estimation performance on Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP datasets. Further experiments on in-the-wild datasets also illustrate the capability to access more data to boost our model. The code will be publicly available upon publication.