VIMCAN: Visual-Inertial 3D Human Pose Estimation with Hybrid Mamba-Cross-Attention Network
Authors: Zepeng Yang, Junxuan Bai, Hao Li, Ju Dai, Junjun Pan, Yongfeng Yin, Bin Li
Organizations: Beihang University · Capital University of Physical Education and Sports · Peng Cheng Laboratory · Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
The rapid advances in deep learning have significantly enhanced the accuracy of multimodal 3D human pose estimation (HPE). However, the state-of-the-art (SOTA) HPE pipelines still rely on Transformers, whose quadratic complexity makes real-time processing for long sequences impractical. Mamba addresses this issue through selective state-space modeling, enabling efficient sequence processing without sacrificing representational power. Nevertheless, it struggles to capture complex spatial dependencies in multimodal settings. To bridge this gap, we propose VIMCAN, a hybrid architecture that combines the efficient sequence modeling of Mamba with the spatial reasoning of Cross-Attention, and performs robust visual-inertial fusion and human pose estimation between RGB keypoints and wearable IMU data. By leveraging Mamba's dynamic parameterization for temporal modeling and Attention for spatial dependency extraction, VIMCAN achieves superior accuracy, with mean per-joint position errors (MPJPE) of 17.2 mm on TotalCapture and 45.3 mm on 3DPW. VIMCAN outperforms prior Transformer-based and other SOTA approaches while supporting real-time inference at over 60 frames per second on consumer-grade hardware. The source code is available at \href{https://github.com/Eddieyzp/VIMCAN}{this GitHub repository}.
Monocular 3D human pose estimation (HPE) remains challenging due to depth ambiguity, occlu- sions, and the need for temporal consistency. While multi-view methods provide superior accuracy over monocular approaches, they often require complex setups. We introduce STA-TFM, a transformer-based architecture that combines spatial and temporal information for multi-view pose estimation. The approach leverages DSTformer, a monocular feature extractor, to capture long-range pose dependencies within each view. A fusion transformer then aggregates information across views to produce coherent 3D estimates. To address training data scarcity, we use a data generation pipeline that transforms any existing 3D pose dataset into multi-view setups with controllable parameters. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate that STA-TFM outperforms existing camera-parameter-free multi-view methods. STA-TFM achieves 50.9% and 49.5% reductions in mean per joint position error (MPJPE) and mean per joint velocity error (MPJVE) on the DHP19 dataset. Furthermore, it achieves 6.7% and 7.7% respective reductions on HAA4D, and a 15.2% MPJPE reduction on TotalCapture. STA-TFM handles noisy and missing 2D inputs, supporting potential deployment in healthcare monitoring, athletic assessment, and immersive technologies. Code, training checkpoints, and data are available at https://zenodo.org/records/22832620.
Transformer-based methods have achieved strong performance in monocular 3D human pose estimation, but most existing approaches organise spatial and temporal reasoning as separate stages, which may weaken unified spatial-temporal interdependencies inherent in human motion and compress frame-level structural information before temporal modelling. In this paper, we propose HSTGFormer, a graph-enhanced Transformer framework that reformulates spatial-temporal reasoning as localised coupled graph aggregation over joint-time nodes. Specifically, HSTGFormer introduces a Hyper Spatial-Temporal Graph (HSTG), which decomposes global spatial-temporal reasoning into local spatial-temporal receptive fields around individual joint-time nodes by extending per-frame skeleton graphs into temporal neighbourhoods, thereby enabling structure-aware coupled reasoning while preserving local structural motion information. It further incorporates an Adaptive Dual-Scale Temporal Graph (ADSTG) to capture joint-specific temporal dependencies over complementary short- and long-range windows. A lightweight node-wise fusion module further adaptively integrates the two graph representations for each joint-time node. Experiments on Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP show that HSTGFormer achieves strong accuracy with high computational efficiency.
We introduce HYPERPOSE, a novel 3D human pose estimation framework that performs spatio-temporal reasoning entirely within the Lorentz model of hyperbolic space Hd to natively preserve the hierarchical tree topology of the human skeleton. Current state-of-the-art pose estimators aim to capture complex joint dynamics by relying on transformers and graph convolutional networks. Since these architectures operate exclusively in Euclidean space which fundamentally mismatches the inherent tree structure of the human body, these methods inevitably suffer from exponential volume distortion and struggle to maintain structural coherence. To this end, we depart from flat spaces and aim to improve geometric fidelity with Hyperbolic Kinematic Phase-Space Attention (HKPSA), natively embedding complex joint relationships without distortion, alongside a multi-scale windowed hyperbolic attention mechanism that efficiently models temporal dynamics in O(TW) complexity. Furthermore, to overcome the well-known instability of training non-Euclidean manifolds, HYPERPOSE introduces a novel Riemannian loss suite and an uncertainty-weighted curriculum, enforcing physical geodesic constraints like bone length and velocity consistency. Extensive evaluations on the Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP datasets demonstrate that HYPERPOSE achieves state-of-the-art structural and temporal coherence, significantly reducing both volume distortion and velocity error, while establishing new state-of-the-art benchmarks in overall positional accuracy.