Systems and computer-implemented methods for use in body pose estimation are provided. Training data is obtained, where the training data includes observation vector data and corresponding pose vector data for a plurality of images. The observation vector data is representative of the images in observation space. The pose vector data is representative of the same images in pose space. Based on the training data, a model is computed that includes parameters of mapping from the observation space to latent space, parameters of mapping from the latent space to the pose space, and parameters of the latent space. The latent space has a lower dimensionality than the observation space and the pose space.