Perception

Human Pose Estimation

Human pose estimation is the task of recovering the configuration of the human body from sensor data, as 2D or 3D skeletal keypoints or as a parametric mesh such as SMPL. Systems like OpenPose established real-time multi-person 2D estimation, while modern methods regress full 3D body shape from monocular video, enabling motion capture without markers.

Why it matters for physical AI

Extracting body motion from ordinary video unlocks human demonstrations at internet scale for humanoid learning, and real-time pose tracking underpins collision avoidance and intent prediction around people.