ProPose: Probabilistic 3D Human Pose Estimation with Instance-Level Distribution and Normalizing Flow

3D Human Pose Estimation (HPE) is a one-to-many problem by nature, making it challenging to estimate an accurate 3D pose from a single 2D pose. Some prior works have attempted to tackle this problem by using a conditional generative network. They generate 3D poses from a given 2D pose with noises from a standard Gaussian distribution, while the depth distribution is dependent on each posture and more complex than the standard Gaussian distribution. This may lead to inaccurate distribution learning. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic framework called ProPose to address this issue. ProPose employs Pose Instance-Level Gaussian Distribution (PILGD) derived from 3D pose-based self-representation learning to obtain reliable distribution which is able to address pose-dependent depth distribution. To access this PILGD, we utilize normalizing flow, which learns a mapping function between the PILGD and a 2D Pose-Adaptive Gaussian Distribution (PAGD). This converts the problem of directly estimating 3D poses from 2D poses to a mapping problem between PILGD and PAGD using a normalizing flow. Extensive experiments show the advantages of utilizing the PILGD and PAGD. ProPose achieves comparable performances to previous state-of-the-art probabilistic methods in a multi-hypothesis setting. Notably, ProPose in a single-hypothesis setting demonstrates comparable generalization ability to existing state-of-the-art deterministic methods.