PCHMR: Empowering and Benchmarking Human Mesh Recovery in Privacy-Constrained Real-World Settings
Authors: Zeyu Cao, Qingxuan Wu, Zhiyang Dou, Rui Xu, Yuan Liu, Javier Fernandez-Marques, Nicholas D. Lane, Taku Komura, Wenping Wang
Organizations: University of Cambridge · University of Pennsylvania · The University of Hong Kong · Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Flower Labs · Texas A&M University
Fine-tuning directly on user-side data is an effective way to improve the performance of widely adopted data-driven human mesh recovery (HMR) models. However, doing so for existing HMR methods often assumes aggregating user-side data from real-world HMR-deployed devices to a central training server, posing a significant privacy risk as sensitive human images are transmitted. How can human mesh recovery be evaluated and improved in privacy-constrained real-world settings? We study this question through a benchmark in which state-of-the-art HMR models are trained with federated learning and a secure-aggregation variant, neither of which centralizes raw images, and evaluated across a wide range of client-scale and data-heterogeneity settings. We document that common HMR training pipelines are built around centralized data access and quantify how representative HMR backbones behave when that assumption is removed. Furthermore, to study the data bottleneck of privacy-constrained HMR training, we propose DePoser, a local annotation and fine-tuning pipeline enhanced with depth foundation models, with which collaboratively trained HMR models can be locally tailored to the end user's distribution. On in-the-wild data, fine-tuning on DePoser annotations improves personalization accuracy, measured against DePoser-generated pseudo-ground truth. This benchmark aims to support future work on privacy-constrained HMR models and their real-world deployment and evaluation.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Comparison between centralized and privacy-constrained HMR frameworks. Existing HMR frameworks commonly assume centralized training (a), which requires uploading sensitive user data and therefore raises privacy concerns. In comparison, PCHMR benchmarks privacy-constrained settings for HMR models (b), where raw data remain on the device and only model updates are exchanged. Locally generated annotations then provide additional supervision, so HMR models can be improved with privacy-constrained real-world human data .
Figure 2: Overview of the Pipeline for Privacy-Constrained HMR. Data labeling can be done offline via a local data annotator (1, 2). After that, the labels of user-generated data are used to collaboratively train a new global model with privacy constraints (3, 4). User data never leave the device. The global model is then deployed for real-time on-device inference (5, 6). PCHMR benchmarks implementations of such a privacy-constrained pipeline under various real-world settings.
#Clients (Total / Per Round )
Model
MPJPE
PA-MPJPE
Raw Data Local?
Centralized
FM-S
57.98
40.62
✗
10 / 10
FM-S
56.85
40.52
✓
100 / 10
FM-S
59.31
41.48
✓
1000 / 10
FM-S
60.82
44.53
✓
Centralized
TORE-S
63.88
41.99
✗
10 / 10
TORE-S
61.27
41.60
✓
Table 1: Effect of Number of Clients. HMR results (MPJPE and PA-MPJPE) for the PCHMR baseline experiments ( 10/10 ), the Independent and Identically Distributed (IID) data 100-client experiments ( 100/10 ), and IID data 1000-client experiments ( 1000/10 ) with their best evaluation results. All experiments select 10 clients per round uniformly at random. For comparison, we also add the centralized baseline trained with the same model and the same dataset.
Optimizer
FM-S Model
TORE-S Model
MPJPE
PA-MPJPE
MPJPE
PA-MPJPE
IID Distribution
FedAvg
59.31
41.48
62.92
43.11
FedOpt
58.49
41.43
62.82
42.34
FedProx
57.71
41.26
63.41
43.17
LDA α=0.5 Distribution
Table 2: Effect of Federated Optimizer. Performance of HMR models with different federated optimizers (FedAvg, FedOpt, FedProx) on IID data and LDA skewed data. The results are measured with 100-client experiments ( 100/10 ) with 10 clients sampled per round.
Figure 3: Data Distribution Evaluation. Performance metrics for heterogeneous data distribution settings with different LDA α , evaluated with the Human3.6M ( Ionescu et al., 2013 ) dataset.
Setting
Model
MPJPE
PA-MPJPE
Raw Data Local?
Centralized
FM-S
61.38
41.63
✗
PCHMR
FM-S
58.28
40.42
✓
Centralized
TORE-S
63.89
41.40
✗
PCHMR
TORE-S
61.59
41.94
✓
Table 3: Mixed Dataset Training. Comparison between FastMETRO-S ( Cho et al., 2022 ) and TORE-S ( Dou et al., 2023 ) trained under centralized or privacy-constrained settings on a mixed dataset composed of Human3.6M, UP-3D, COCO, MuCo-3DHP, and MPII ( Ionescu et al., 2013 ; Lassner et al., 2017 ; Lin et al., 2014 ; Mehta et al., 2018 ; Andriluka et al., 2014 ) , evaluated on Human3.6M.
Setting
Model
MPJPE
PA-MPJPE
MPVPE
Raw Data Local?
Centralized
FM-S
84.92
54.69
97.60
✗
PCHMR
FM-S
84.66
54.78
97.42
✓
PCHMR (Natural Part.)
FM-S
86.83
55.61
99.66
✓
Centralized
TORE-S
87.97
55.35
101.88
✗
PCHMR
TORE-S
87.55
54.08
101.86
✓
PCHMR (Natural Part.)
TORE-S
88.00
55.07
102.50
✓
Table 4: Performance of PCHMR on 3DPW. Reconstruction accuracy when PCHMR is fine-tuned on the 3DPW dataset. We further evaluate the model’s performance on the natural scene partition (Natural Part.), where each scene is assigned to a device. PCHMR reaches comparable performance on 3DPW fine-tuning compared with the centralized setting. PCHMR is trained with 100 devices and 10 randomly selected each round, while the natural partition is 20 devices with 5 randomly selected each round.
Dataset
Before/After
Model
MPVPE
MPJPE
PA-MPJPE
VR-runner
Before PCHMR
FM-S
109.50
114.51
60.07
VR-runner
After PCHMR
FM-S
93.23
58.24
43.16
VR-game-1
Before PCHMR
FM-S
176.24
172.57
78.21
VR-game-1
After PCHMR
FM-S
65.57
62.30
43.82
VR-game-2
Before PCHMR
FM-S
150.64
161.82
84.36
VR-game-2
After PCHMR
FM-S
82.53
69.49
53.57
Table 5: Local Fine-Tuning Results. Reconstruction error before and after local fine-tuning with PCHMR, computed on the held-out validation split of the locally annotated data against DePoser pseudo-labels (Appendix D ).
Figure 4: Qualitative results of PCHMR on Human3.6M ( Ionescu et al., 2013 ) (a,b) and 3DPW ( Von Marcard et al., 2018 ) (c,d), trained with 100 clients and 10 randomly sampled per round. The backbones are FastMETRO ( Cho et al., 2022 ) (a,c) and TORE ( Dou et al., 2023 ) (b,d).
Model
MPVPE
MPJPE
PA-MPJPE
SMPLify-X ( Pavlakos et al., 2019a )
198.66
181.07
87.17
DePoser (Ours)
162.60
151.19
71.14
Table 6: Comparison between DePoser and SMPLify-X ( Pavlakos et al., 2019a ) on a sub-sampled 3DPW ( Von Marcard et al., 2018 ) dataset. DePoser demonstrates improved reconstruction accuracy compared to SMPLify-X under the combined Sapiens pose and depth prior.
Figure 11
Appendix figures & tables15 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Setting
Model
Clients
Learning Rate
Epochs
Local Epochs ( E )
Global Rounds ( T )
Centralized Baseline
FM-S
-
0.001
60
–
–
Human3.6M naïve on-device training
FM-S
-
0.001
60
–
–
3DPW Centralized Fine-tuning
FM-S
-
0.0001
20
–
–
PCHMR + IID Data 10 / 10
FM-S
10 / 10
0.001
–
1
200
PCHMR + IID Data 100 / 10
FM-S
100 / 10
0.001
–
1
2000
PCHMR + IID Data 1000 / 10
FM-S
1000 / 10
0.001
–
1
6000
Appendix
Table 7: The hyperparameters used by all PCHMR experiments. The two numbers in the Clients column denote the total number of clients and the number of clients randomly selected in each round. Epochs counts passes over the full training set and applies only to the centralized runs; the federated runs are specified instead by the number of local epochs E each sampled client performs per round and the number of global rounds T . The two units are not interchangeable, and we quote a budget in only one of them per run.
Wall-clock (h)
Regime
Budget
Eff. batch
Optimizer steps
Sample-visits
Epoch-equiv.
Critical path
FM-S
TORE-S
Val. evals
Centralized (as published)
60 epochs
512
55,800
28,563,720
60.0
–
18.9
18.7
60
Centralized, budget-matched
200 epochs
512
186,000
95,212,400
200.0
–
63.0
62.3
200
Centralized, step-matched
200 epochs
64
1,487,800
95,212,400
200.0
–
≈500†
≈500†
200
PCHMR, IID 10/10
200 rounds
64
1,488,000
95,212,400
200.0
148,800
44.3
47.1
200
PCHMR, IID 100/10
2000 rounds
64
1,500,203
95,212,580
200.0
150,203
60.5
55.9
200
Appendix
Table 8: Training Budget of Every Regime. Optimizer steps are gradient updates summed over all clients; sample-visits count one image passed through the model once, and epoch-equivalents divide them by the 476,062 -image training set; the critical path counts the steps of the slowest client sampled in each round, summed over rounds. All federated rows use one local epoch ( E=1 ) and a local batch of 64 ; the LDA rows use 100 clients with 10 sampled per round and are averaged over partition and client-sampling seeds. Wall-clock is the only backbone-dependent quantity and is reported separately for each; measured values are the median over the runs of that backbone that completed their configured budget in that setting, and † marks a projected value for the step-matched configuration. Runs were executed on a shared cluster with heterogeneous nodes, so wall-clock should be read as an order-of-magnitude comparison rather than a controlled timing benchmark, and it measures our simulation cost rather than the latency of a real deployment; Val. evals is the number of validation passes performed over a run.
Figure 7: Validation Error against Three Measures of Training Budget. Each row shows the same six runs for one backbone — the budget-matched 200 -epoch centralized re-run, the three IID client scales, and the LDA partitions at α=0.1 and α=10 — plotted against sample-visits (left), optimizer steps (middle), and the native progress counter each regime was logged on, epochs centrally and communication rounds federated (right). The left two panels place the two regimes on a common axis and are the comparison table 8 quantifies; the right panel is what that comparison looks like when it is not aligned, and is included because epochs and rounds are not interchangeable units. Faint traces are the raw per-epoch and per-round evaluations and bold traces an exponential moving average over them. All axes are linear, and the vertical range is clipped to the region where the curves separate, so the first few evaluations of each run fall above the panel. On the right-hand panel the horizontal extent of a curve is set by the number of rounds its configuration was run for rather than by the training it received, which is why 1000/10 spans six times the axis of the runs it is compared against while receiving less than a third of their gradient updates.
Figure 8: Details of the Transformer encoder-decoder architecture used in FastMETRO ( Cho et al., 2022 ) and TORE ( Dou et al., 2023 ) .
Methods
Model
Round Time
Convergence
FL
TORE
139.8s
Converge
MPC
TORE
265.5s
Converge
DP
TORE
139.8s
Non-Converge
Appendix
Table 9: Comparison of different privacy-preserving machine learning paradigms. The experiment uses the 10/10 TORE setting on an IID Human3.6M partition and reports average per-round runtime.
Settings
Model
MPJPE
PA-MPJPE
Raw Data Local?
Centralized Baseline
FM-S
57.98
40.62
✗
Naïve 5% Data Training
FM-S
83.78
63.65
-
Naïve 10% Data Training
FM-S
73.04
53.36
-
Naïve 20% Data Training
FM-S
65.10
47.01
-
PCHMR 100% Data Training
FM-S
59.31
41.48
✓
Centralized Baseline
TORE-S
63.88
41.99
✗
Appendix
Table 10: Comparison with Naïve Single-Device Training. This table presents the performance metrics (MPJPE, PA-MPJPE) for training using various sizes (5, 10, 20%) of the Human3.6M dataset to assess the on-device training scenario using only local data. Compared with naïve local training, which suffers from poor performance due to data scarcity, our PCHMR could mitigate both issues due to the inter-device parameter sharing, achieving much higher performance while keeping raw data local. The PCHMR in this table is trained in a distributed setting with 100 devices and 10 devices selected at random each time.
Local Epochs ( E )
Model
MPJPE
PA-MPJPE
Raw Data Local?
1
FM-S
59.31
41.48
✓
2
FM-S
59.28
42.42
✓
3
FM-S
60.49
42.43
✓
5
FM-S
59.52
42.07
✓
10
FM-S
60.03
42.96
✓
1
TORE-S
62.92
43.11
✓
Appendix
Table 11: Effect of Multiple Local Epochs. Ablation on training the HMR model with more than one local epoch E per global round in the federated setting. Note that raising E raises the number of local optimizer steps each sampled client takes per round, and hence the total training budget.
Figure 9: Data Distribution of Applying LDA. Distribution of labels from each dataset using LDA with 5 clients under (a) α=0.5 and (b) α=1000 . Note that the high α LDA retained a similar label distribution to the original category distribution, whereas the lower α introduced a much different category distribution.
Figure 10: LDA-Partitioned Dataset Size for Individual Clients. This figure illustrates the size of the dataset assigned to each client, sorted by the size of data for (a) 100 partitions and (b) 1000 partitions, using LDA. Note that the lower α creates a much more skewed long-tail distribution following the Dirichlet distribution that it is sampled from.
Figure 11: CNN-Partitioned Data Visualization. For visualization, this diagram clusters the selected datasets into 10 partitions with MiniBatchKMeans (the experiments use 100) and plots them using t-SNE ( Van der Maaten and Hinton, 2008 ) . Each partition is sampled with 100 data points for ease of computation. The data points with the same color come from the same cluster.
Figure 12: 3DPW Dataset Distribution. This diagram shows the natural distribution of different scenes in the 3DPW ( Von Marcard et al., 2018 ) dataset. Note that this is only the train set of the 3DPW dataset following the established data train-val partition.
Settings
Model
MPJPE
PA-MPJPE
Raw Data Local?
Centralized
FM-S
57.98
40.62
✗
α = 0.1
FM-S
51.11
37.24
✓
α = 0.5
FM-S
57.80
39.82
✓
α = 1
FM-S
59.63
39.80
✓
α = 10
FM-S
56.09
39.84
✓
α = 100
FM-S
57.53
40.69
✓
Appendix
Table 12: Data Distribution Evaluation. MPJPE and PA-MPJPE under different data distributions (LDA with varying α and CNN clustering), evaluated on Human3.6M ( Ionescu et al., 2013 ) . PCHMR’s error is competitive with the centralized baseline in every setting and lower in some skewed partitions; we do not isolate the cause of these gains. All models (except centralized) in this table are trained in a distributed setting with 100 devices, with 10 devices selected at random each round.
Setting
Model
MPJPE
PA-MPJPE
MPVPE
Raw Data Local?
No Fine-tuning
FM-S
116.35
70.20
132.96
✗
Centralized Fine-tuning
FM-S
84.92
54.69
97.6
✗
PCHMR Fine-tuning
FM-S
84.66
54.78
97.42
✓
No Fine-tuning
TORE-S
119.64
68.35
138.93
✗
Centralized Fine-tuning
TORE-S
87.97
55.35
101.88
✗
PCHMR Fine-tuning
TORE-S
87.55
54.08
101.86
✓
Appendix
Table 13: Privacy-Constrained Fine-Tuning Table. Results of privacy-constrained fine-tuning of models ( Dou et al., 2023 ; Cho et al., 2022 ) pre-trained on Human3.6M, UP-3D, COCO, MPII and MuCo-3DHP ( Ionescu et al., 2013 ; Lassner et al., 2017 ; Lin et al., 2014 ; Andriluka et al., 2014 ; Mehta et al., 2018 ) using PCHMR on the 3DPW dataset ( Von Marcard et al., 2018 ) , compared with centralized fine-tuning with the same datasets and the model without fine-tuning. The privacy-constrained fine-tuning is conducted with 100 clients and 10 randomly sampled per round.
Figure 13: Qualitative results of Cho et al. (2022) before and after privacy-constrained fine-tuning on the 3DPW ( Von Marcard et al., 2018 ) dataset using the PCHMR framework.
Model
Device
100 Partitions
1000 Partitions
Throughput
Time
Throughput
Time
FM-S
Jetson AGX - 15W
2.46
1629.33
2.42
165.33
FM-S
Jetson AGX - 50W
8.01
499.67
7.81
51.23
FM-S
RTX A6000 Ada
56.59
70.7
48.0
8.33
TORE-S
Jetson AGX - 15W
3.43
1166.06
3.35
119.29
TORE-S
Jetson AGX - 50W
8.65
461.5
8.42
47.49
Appendix
Table 14: On-Device Performance Table. This table shows the image throughput and total time used for training with 100 (4000 images) and 1000 (400 images) partitions of client data on different power profiles for Nvidia AGX Orin. We also compare the image throughput and total time with a desktop-level graphics card (RTX A6000 Ada). The unit for Throughput is images per second (img/s), and the unit for Time is seconds (s).
Multi-view human mesh recovery (HMR) is broadly deployed in diverse domains where high accuracy and strong generalization are essential. Existing approaches can be broadly grouped into geometry-based and learning-based methods. However, geometry-based methods (e.g., triangulation) rely on cumbersome camera calibration, while learning-based approaches often generalize poorly to unseen camera configurations due to the lack of multi-view training data, limiting their performance in real-world scenarios. To enable calibration-free reconstruction that generalizes to arbitrary camera setups, we propose a training-free framework that leverages pretrained single-view HMR models as strong priors, eliminating the need for multi-view training data. Our method first constructs a robust and consistent multi-view initialization from single-view predictions, and then refines it via test-time optimization guided by multi-view consistency and anatomical constraints. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks, surpassing multi-view models trained with explicit multi-view supervision.
Haoyu Xie, Shengkai Xu, Cheng Guo +6
University of North Carolina at Charlotte · University of Central Florida
Human mesh recovery (HMR) aims to recover 3D human meshes from images. Most existing HMR benchmarks and methods focus on either multi-person reconstruction from a single view or single-person reconstruction from multiple views, where the number of subjects and the scene scale are relatively limited. Such settings are insufficient for real-world applications with large scenes and severe inter-person occlusions. To address this limitation, we introduce a large-scale synthetic benchmark for multiview multi-person HMR, termed MVMP-HMR. The proposed dataset contains 15 complex scenes with up to 50 camera views and 30 interacting persons, featuring large spatial coverage and severe occlusions, which significantly increases the difficulty of human mesh recovery. Based on this benchmark, we further propose a multiview multi-person whole-body human mesh recovery model, referred to as MVMP-HMR model. The model first fuses multiview features into a scene-level 3D feature volume, and then leverages pelvis joints predicted by a 3D pose estimation network to extract person-specific queries from the 3D feature volume. These human queries are cross-attended with the 3D feature volume and integrated to decode each person's 3D mesh. Moreover, we introduce two novel losses--the orientation loss and the 3D joint density loss--to alleviate orientation and pose ambiguities under severe occlusions. Experiments demonstrate that existing state-of-the-art HMR methods struggle on the proposed MVMP-HMR benchmark, while our method consistently outperforms prior SOTAs in large-scale scenes with severe occlusions.
Qi Zhang, Tao Yu, Jiechao He +2
Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Visual Media and Multidimensional Intelligence, College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University, China · City University of Hong Kong, China
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar has shown great potential for contactless, privacy-preserving, and robust human sensing, yet existing mmWave-based human mesh reconstruction (HMR) studies are still limited by the lack of benchmarks for generalization analysis under configuration shifts and fair comparison of different algorithms. To address the limitation, we present DGHMesh, a large-scale dual-radar mmWave dataset and generalization-focused benchmark for HMR. It contains data from 15 subjects performing 8 actions, with 360,000 synchronized frames collected from FMCW radar, SFCW radar, RGB images, and high-precision 3D HMR annotations. In addition, the dataset provides synchronized raw I/Q data from both radar modalities and accurately calibrated radar spatial positions. The benchmark is designed to evaluate HMR methods under diverse measurement configurations, including human position shifts, human orientation shifts, subarray size variations, and cross-subject settings. Based on DGHMesh, we also propose mmPTM, a query-based multi-radar fusion framework that jointly exploits point clouds and imaging tubes for HMR. Extensive experiments are conducted against representative baselines under different settings. The results demonstrate that mmPTM consistently achieves outstanding accuracy and competitive generalization capability across multiple sub-benchmarks, validating the effectiveness of multi-radar fusion and the practical value of the proposed dataset and benchmark for mmWave-based HMR research. DGHMesh and mmPTM are publicly available at https://github.com/SPIresearch/DGHMesh.(The complete benchmark and code will be released after paper publication)
Rongxiao Guo, Qingchao Chen
Institute of Medical Technology, Peking University Health Science Center · National Institute of Health Data Science at Peking University · State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence, Peking University