There has been a recent surge of interest in introducing transformers to 3D human pose estimation (HPE) due to their powerful capabilities in modeling long-term dependencies. However, existing transformer-based methods treat body joints as equally important inputs and ignore the prior knowledge of human skeleton topology in the self-attention mechanism. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we propose a Pose-Oriented Transformer (POT) with uncertainty guided refinement for 3D HPE. Specifically, we first develop novel pose-oriented self-attention mechanism and distance-related position embedding for POT to explicitly exploit the human skeleton topology. The pose-oriented self-attention mechanism explicitly models the topological interactions between body joints, whereas the distance-related position embedding encodes the distance of joints to the root joint to distinguish groups of joints with different difficulties in regression. Furthermore, we present an Uncertainty-Guided Refinement Network (UGRN) to refine pose predictions from POT, especially for the difficult joints, by considering the estimated uncertainty of each joint with uncertainty-guided sampling strategy and self-attention mechanism. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with reduced model parameters on 3D HPE benchmarks such as Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP

本文提出了一种姿势导向的自注意机制和基于距离的位置嵌入的Pose-Oriented Transformer(POT)以明确利用人类骨骼拓扑，并通过考虑每个关节的预测不确定度进行不确定性引导的采样策略和自注注意机制来优化POT的姿态预测。实验结果表明，在3D HPE基准测试中，我们的方法在减少模型参数并且比其他最先进方法的性能显著提高。

姿态导向的不确定性引导下的Transformer对2D到3D人体姿态估计进行精细优化