ESMformer: Error-aware self-supervised transformer for multi-view 3D human pose estimation

Abstract

Multi-view 3D human pose estimation (HPE) currently faces several key challenges. Information from different viewpoints exhibits high variability due to complex environmental factors, posing difficulties in cross-view feature extraction and fusion. Additionally, multi-view 3D labeled pose data is rather scarce, and the impact of input 2D poses on 3D HPE accuracy has received little attention. To address these issues, we propose an Error-aware Self-supervised transformer framework for Multi-view 3D HPE (ESMformer). Firstly, we introduce a single-view multi-level feature extraction module to enhance pose features in individual viewpoints, which incorporates a novel relative attention mechanism for representative feature extraction at different levels. Subsequently, we develop multi-view intra-level and cross-level fusion modules to exploit spatio-temporal feature dependencies among human joints, and progressively fuse pose information from all views and levels. Furthermore, we explore an error-aware self-supervised learning strategy to reduce the model’s reliance on 3D pose annotations and mitigate the impact of incorrect 2D poses. This strategy adaptively selects reliable input 2D poses based on 3D pose prediction errors. Experiments on three popular benchmarks show that ESMformer achieves state-of-the-art results and maintains cost-effective computational complexity. Notably, ESMformer does not rely on any 3D pose annotations or prior human body knowledge, making it highly versatile and adaptable in practical applications.11The code and models are available at https://github.com/z0911k/ESMformer.