  Human pose estimation is a key step to action recognition. We propose a
method of estimating 3D human poses from a single image, which works in
conjunction with an existing 2D pose/joint detector. 3D pose estimation is
challenging because multiple 3D poses may correspond to the same 2D pose after
projection due to the lack of depth information. Moreover, current 2D pose
estimators are usually inaccurate which may cause errors in the 3D estimation.
We address the challenges in three ways: (i) We represent a 3D pose as a linear
combination of a sparse set of bases learned from 3D human skeletons. (ii) We
enforce limb length constraints to eliminate anthropomorphically implausible
skeletons. (iii) We estimate a 3D pose by minimizing the $L_1$-norm error
between the projection of the 3D pose and the corresponding 2D detection. The
$L_1$-norm loss term is robust to inaccurate 2D joint estimations. We use the
alternating direction method (ADM) to solve the optimization problem
efficiently. Our approach outperforms the state-of-the-arts on three benchmark
datasets.
