cs.CVMay 14, 2026

From Sparse to Dense: Spatio-Temporal Fusion for Multi-View 3D Human Pose Estimation with DenseWarper

Authors: Ling LiChangjie ChenYuyan WangJiaqing LyuKenglun ChangYiyun ChenZhidong Deng

Organizations: Department of Computer Science, THUAI, BNRist, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China · University of Manchester, Manchester, UK · Apple, Beijing, China · Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guang Zhou), Guang Zhou, China

Abstract

In multi-view 3D human pose estimation, models typically rely on images captured simultaneously from different camera views to predict a pose at a specific moment. While providing accurate spatial information, this traditional approach often overlooks the rich temporal dependencies between adjacent frames. We propose a novel 3D human pose estimation input method: the sparse interleaved input to address this. This method leverages images captured from different camera views at various time points (e.g., View 1 at time tt and View 2 at time t+δt+δ), allowing our model to capture rich spatio-temporal information and effectively boost performance. More importantly, this approach offers two key advantages: First, it can theoretically increase the output pose frame rate by N times with N cameras, thereby breaking through single-view frame rate limitations and enhancing the temporal resolution of the production. Second, using a sparse subset of available frames, our method can reduce data redundancy and simultaneously achieve better performance. We introduce the DenseWarper model, which leverages epipolar geometry for efficient spatio-temporal heatmap exchange. We conducted extensive experiments on the Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP datasets. Results demonstrate that our method, utilizing only sparse interleaved images as input, outperforms traditional dense multi-view input approaches and achieves state-of-the-art performance. The source code for this work is available at: https://github.com/lingli1724/DenseWarper-ICLR2026

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