Can Generative Video Models Help Pose Estimation?

Pairwise pose estimation from images with little or no overlap is an open challenge in computer vision. Existing methods, even those trained on large-scale datasets, struggle in these scenarios due to the lack of identifiable correspondences or visual overlap. Inspired by the human ability to infer spatial relationships from diverse scenes, we propose a novel approach that leverages the rich priors encoded within pre-trained generative video models. We propose to use a video model to hallucinate intermediate frames between two input images, effectively creating a dense, visual transition, which significantly simplifies the problem of pose estimation.Since current video models can still produce implausible motion or inconsistent geometry, we introduce a self-consistency score that evaluates the consistency of pose predictions from sampled videos.We demonstrate that our approach generalizes among three state-of-the-art video models and show consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art DUSt3R baseline on four diverse datasets encompassing indoor, outdoor, and object-centric scenes.Our findings suggest a promising avenue for improving pose estimation models by leveraging large generative models trained on vast amounts of video data, which is more readily available than 3D data.