Efficient Diffusion-Based 3D Human Pose Estimation With Hierarchical Temporal Pruning
Yuquan Bi, Hongsong Wang, Xinli Shi, Zhipeng Gui, Jie Gui, Yuan Yan Tang · IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology · 2026
Diffusion models have demonstrated strong capabilities in generating high-fidelity 3D human poses, yet their iterative nature and multi-hypothesis requirements incur substantial computational cost. In this paper, we propose an efficient diffusion-based 3D human pose estimation framework with a Hierarchical Temporal Pruning (HTP) strategy, which dynamically prunes redundant pose tokens across both frame and semantic levels while preserving critical motion dynamics. HTP operates in a staged, top-down manner: (1) Temporal Correlation-Enhanced Pruning (TCEP) identifies essential frames by analyzing inter-frame motion correlations through adaptive temporal graph construction; (2) Sparse-Focused Temporal MHSA (SFT MHSA) leverages the resulting frame-level sparsity to reduce attention computation, focusing on motion-relevant tokens; and (3) Mask-Guided Pose Token Pruner (MGPTP) performs fine-grained semantic pruning via clustering, retaining only the most informative pose tokens. Experiments on Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP show that HTP reduces training MACs by 38.5%, inference MACs by 56.8%, and improves inference speed by an average of 81.1% compared to prior diffusion-based methods, while achieving state-of-the-art performance.