Abstract: Automatic 3D reconstruction of human poses from monocular images is a challenging and popular topic in the computer vision community, which provides a wide range of applications in multiple areas. Solutions for 3D pose estimation involve various learning approaches, such as support vector machines and Gaussian processes, but many encounter difficulties in cluttered scenarios and require additional input data, such as silhouettes, or controlled camera settings. We present a framework that is capable of estimating the 3D pose of a person from single images or monocular image sequences without requiring background information and which is robust to camera variations. The framework models the non-linearity present in human pose estimation as it benefits from flexible learning approaches, including a highly customizable 2D detector. Results on the HumanEva benchmark show how they perform and influence the quality of the 3D pose estimates.