  Many real-world applications require the estimation of human body joints for
higher-level tasks as, for example, human behaviour understanding. In recent
years, depth sensors have become a popular approach to obtain three-dimensional
information. The depth maps generated by these sensors provide information that
can be employed to disambiguate the poses observed in two-dimensional images.
This work addresses the problem of 3D human pose estimation from depth maps
employing a Deep Learning approach. We propose a model, named Deep Depth Pose
(DDP), which receives a depth map containing a person and a set of predefined
3D prototype poses and returns the 3D position of the body joints of the
person. In particular, DDP is defined as a ConvNet that computes the specific
weights needed to linearly combine the prototypes for the given input. We have
thoroughly evaluated DDP on the challenging 'ITOP' and 'UBC3V' datasets, which
respectively depict realistic and synthetic samples, defining a new
state-of-the-art on them.
