  In this work, we address the problem of 3D human pose estimation from a
sequence of 2D human poses. Although the recent success of deep networks has
led many state-of-the-art methods for 3D pose estimation to train deep networks
end-to-end to predict from images directly, the top-performing approaches have
shown the effectiveness of dividing the task of 3D pose estimation into two
steps: using a state-of-the-art 2D pose estimator to estimate the 2D pose from
images and then mapping them into 3D space. They also showed that a
low-dimensional representation like 2D locations of a set of joints can be
discriminative enough to estimate 3D pose with high accuracy. However,
estimation of 3D pose for individual frames leads to temporally incoherent
estimates due to independent error in each frame causing jitter. Therefore, in
this work we utilize the temporal information across a sequence of 2D joint
locations to estimate a sequence of 3D poses. We designed a
sequence-to-sequence network composed of layer-normalized LSTM units with
shortcut connections connecting the input to the output on the decoder side and
imposed temporal smoothness constraint during training. We found that the
knowledge of temporal consistency improves the best reported result on
Human3.6M dataset by approximately $12.2\%$ and helps our network to recover
temporally consistent 3D poses over a sequence of images even when the 2D pose
detector fails.
