  Automatic estimation of 3D human pose from monocular RGB images is a
challenging and unsolved problem in computer vision. In a supervised manner,
approaches heavily rely on laborious annotations and present hampered
generalization ability due to the limited diversity of 3D pose datasets. To
address these challenges, we propose a unified framework that leverages mask as
supervision for unsupervised 3D pose estimation. With general unsupervised
segmentation algorithms, the proposed model employs skeleton and physique
representations that exploit accurate pose information from coarse to fine.
Compared with previous unsupervised approaches, we organize the human skeleton
in a fully unsupervised way which enables the processing of annotation-free
data and provides ready-to-use estimation results. Comprehensive experiments
demonstrate our state-of-the-art pose estimation performance on Human3.6M and
MPI-INF-3DHP datasets. Further experiments on in-the-wild datasets also
illustrate the capability to access more data to boost our model. Code will be
available at https://github.com/Charrrrrlie/Mask-as-Supervision.
