The pose and shape of a human body may be recovered based on joint location information associated with the human body. The joint location information may be derived based on an image of the human body or from an output of a human motion capture system. The recovery of the pose and shape of the human body may be performed by a computer-implemented artificial neural network (ANN) trained to perform the recovery task using training datasets that include paired joint location information and human model parameters. The training of the ANN may be conducted in accordance with multiple constraints designed to improve the accuracy of the recovery and by artificially manipulating the training data so that the ANN can learn to recover the pose and shape of the human body even with partially observed joint locations.