Map-Mono-Ego: Map-Grounded Global Human Pose Estimation from Monocular Egocentric Video
Authors: Hiroyuki Deguchi, Ryosuke Hori, Kotaro Amaya, Tsubasa Maruyama, Mitsunori Tada, Hideo Saito
Organizations: 1Keio University · 2National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology
Abstract
Monocular egocentric human pose estimation is essential for ubiquitous activity monitoring. However, understanding the user's absolute location within the environment remains a challenge. Existing methods primarily focus on relative motion from an initial position, and tend not to account for the wearer's absolute location within an environment. Furthermore, inherent scale ambiguity in monocular vision leads to severe translational drift, limiting long-term tracking without specialized multi-sensor hardware. To address this, we propose MapMonoEgo, a novel framework achieving globally consistent human pose estimation solely from a monocular camera by leveraging a pre-scanned 3D point cloud. We also introduce AIST-Living dataset, a new dataset pairing egocentric video with ground-truth motion in a scanned environment. Experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline, proving its utility for practical monitoring tasks without specialized hardware.
Reconstructing the absolute 3D pose and shape of the hands from the user's viewpoint using a single head-mounted camera is crucial for practical egocentric interaction in AR/VR, telepresence, and hand-centric manipulation tasks, where sensing must remain compact and unobtrusive. While monocular RGB methods have made progress, they remain constrained by depth-scale ambiguity and struggle to generalize across the diverse optical configurations of head-mounted devices. As a result, models typically require extensive training on device-specific datasets, which are costly and laborious to acquire. This paper addresses these challenges by introducing EgoForce, a monocular 3D hand reconstruction framework that recovers robust, absolute 3D hand pose and its position from the user's (camera-space) viewpoint. EgoForce operates across fisheye, perspective, and distorted wide-FOV camera models using a single unified network. Our approach combines a differentiable forearm representation that stabilizes hand pose, a unified arm-hand transformer that predicts both hand and forearm geometry from a single egocentric view, mitigating depth-scale ambiguity, and a ray space closed-form solver that enables absolute 3D pose recovery across diverse head-mounted camera models. Experiments on three egocentric benchmarks show that EgoForce achieves state-of-the-art 3D accuracy, reducing camera-space MPJPE by up to 28% on the HOT3D dataset compared to prior methods and maintaining consistent performance across camera configurations. For more details, visit the project page at https://dfki-av.github.io/EgoForce.
Tracking 3D human motion from egocentric multi-camera headset is challenged by severe egomotion, partial visibility or occlusions and lack of training data. Existing methods designed for monocular video often require static or slowly-moving cameras and cannot efficiently leverage multi-view, calibrated and localized input. This makes them brittle and prone to fail on dynamic egocentric captures. We propose LAMP (Localization Aware Multi-camera People Tracking): a novel, simple framework to solve this via early disentanglement of observer and target motion. LAMP introduces a two-step process. First, we leverage the known device 6 DoF motion and calibration to convert detected 2D body keypoints from all cameras over a temporal window into a unified 3D world reference frame. Second, an end-to-end-trained spatio-temporal transformer fits 3D human motion directly to this 3D ray cloud. This "lift-then-fit" approach allows LAMP to learn and leverage a natural human motion prior in the world-space, as well as providing an elegant framework to flexibly incorporate information from multiple temporally asynchronous, partially observing and moving cameras. LAMP achieves state-of-the-art results on monocular benchmarks, while significantly outperforming baselines for our targeted egocentric setting.
Monocular visual odometry (VO) is a fundamental computer vision problem with applications in autonomous navigation, augmented reality and more. While deep learning-based methods have recently shown superior accuracy compared to traditional geometric pipelines, particularly in environments where handcrafted features struggle due to poor structure or lighting conditions, most rely on deterministic regression, which lacks the uncertainty awareness required for robust applications. We propose PoseFM, the first framework to reformulate monocular frame-to-frame VO as a generative task using Flow Matching (FM). By leveraging FM, we model camera motion as a distribution rather than a point estimate, learning to transform noise into realistic pose predictions via continuous-time ODEs. This approach provides a principled mechanism for uncertainty estimation and enables robust motion inference under challenging visual conditions. In our evaluations, PoseFM achieves strong performance on TartanAir, KITTI and TUM-RGBD benchmarks, achieving the lowest absolute trajectory error (ATE) on some of the trajectories and overall being competitive with the best frame-to-frame monocular VO methods. Code and model checkpoints will be made available at https://github.com/helsinki-sda-group/posefm.