2D Articulated Human Pose Estimation and Retrieval in (Almost) Unconstrained Still Images

We present a technique for estimating the spatial layout of humans in still images—the position of the head, torso and arms. The theme we explore is that once a person is localized using an upper body detector, the search for their body parts can be considerably simplified using weak constraints on position and appearance arising from that detection. Our approach is capable of estimating upper body pose in highly challenging uncontrolled images, without prior knowledge of background, clothing, lighting, or the location and scale of the person in the image. People are only required to be upright and seen from the front or the back (not side). We evaluate the stages of our approach experimentally using ground truth layout annotation on a variety of challenging material, such as images from the PASCAL VOC 2008 challenge and video frames from TV shows and feature films. We also propose and evaluate techniques for searching a video dataset for people in a specific pose. To this end, we develop three new pose descriptors and compare their classification and retrieval performance to two baselines built on state-of-the-art object detection model

2D Articulated Human Pose Estimation and Retrieval in (Almost) Unconstrained Still Images

Abstract We present a technique for estimating the spatial layout of humans in still images—the position of the head, torso and arms. The theme we explore is that once a person is localized using an upper body detector, the search for their body parts can be considerably simplified using weak constraints on position and appearance arising from that detection. Our approach is capable of estimating upper body pose in highly challenging uncontrolled images, without prior knowledge of background, clothing, lighting, or the location and scale of the person in the image. People are only required to be upright and seen from the front or the back (not side). We evaluate the stages of our approach experimentally using ground truth layout annotation on a variety of challenging material, such as images from the PASCAL VOC 2008 challenge and video frames from TV shows and feature films. We also propose and evaluate techniques for searching a video dataset for people in a specific pose. To this end, we develop three new pose descriptors and compare their clas

Heterogeneous Multi-task Learning for Human Pose Estimation with Deep Convolutional Neural Network

We propose an heterogeneous multi-task learning framework for human pose estimation from monocular image with deep convolutional neural network. In particular, we simultaneously learn a pose-joint regressor and a sliding-window body-part detector in a deep network architecture. We show that including the body-part detection task helps to regularize the network, directing it to converge to a good solution. We report competitive and state-of-art results on several data sets. We also empirically show that the learned neurons in the middle layer of our network are tuned to localized body parts

Recurrent Human Pose Estimation

We propose a novel ConvNet model for predicting 2D human body poses in an image. The model regresses a heatmap representation for each body keypoint, and is able to learn and represent both the part appearances and the context of the part configuration. We make the following three contributions: (i) an architecture combining a feed forward module with a recurrent module, where the recurrent module can be run iteratively to improve the performance, (ii) the model can be trained end-to-end and from scratch, with auxiliary losses incorporated to improve performance, (iii) we investigate whether keypoint visibility can also be predicted. The model is evaluated on two benchmark datasets. The result is a simple architecture that achieves performance on par with the state of the art, but without the complexity of a graphical model stage (or layers).Comment: FG 2017, More Info and Demo: http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/software/keypoint_detection

Single camera pose estimation using Bayesian filtering and Kinect motion priors

Traditional approaches to upper body pose estimation using monocular vision rely on complex body models and a large variety of geometric constraints. We argue that this is not ideal and somewhat inelegant as it results in large processing burdens, and instead attempt to incorporate these constraints through priors obtained directly from training data. A prior distribution covering the probability of a human pose occurring is used to incorporate likely human poses. This distribution is obtained offline, by fitting a Gaussian mixture model to a large dataset of recorded human body poses, tracked using a Kinect sensor. We combine this prior information with a random walk transition model to obtain an upper body model, suitable for use within a recursive Bayesian filtering framework. Our model can be viewed as a mixture of discrete Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes, in that states behave as random walks, but drift towards a set of typically observed poses. This model is combined with measurements of the human head and hand positions, using recursive Bayesian estimation to incorporate temporal information. Measurements are obtained using face detection and a simple skin colour hand detector, trained using the detected face. The suggested model is designed with analytical tractability in mind and we show that the pose tracking can be Rao-Blackwellised using the mixture Kalman filter, allowing for computational efficiency while still incorporating bio-mechanical properties of the upper body. In addition, the use of the proposed upper body model allows reliable three-dimensional pose estimates to be obtained indirectly for a number of joints that are often difficult to detect using traditional object recognition strategies. Comparisons with Kinect sensor results and the state of the art in 2D pose estimation highlight the efficacy of the proposed approach.Comment: 25 pages, Technical report, related to Burke and Lasenby, AMDO 2014 conference paper. Code sample: https://github.com/mgb45/SignerBodyPose Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJMTSo7-uF

Combining Local Appearance and Holistic View: Dual-Source Deep Neural Networks for Human Pose Estimation

We propose a new learning-based method for estimating 2D human pose from a single image, using Dual-Source Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DS-CNN). Recently, many methods have been developed to estimate human pose by using pose priors that are estimated from physiologically inspired graphical models or learned from a holistic perspective. In this paper, we propose to integrate both the local (body) part appearance and the holistic view of each local part for more accurate human pose estimation. Specifically, the proposed DS-CNN takes a set of image patches (category-independent object proposals for training and multi-scale sliding windows for testing) as the input and then learns the appearance of each local part by considering their holistic views in the full body. Using DS-CNN, we achieve both joint detection, which determines whether an image patch contains a body joint, and joint localization, which finds the exact location of the joint in the image patch. Finally, we develop an algorithm to combine these joint detection/localization results from all the image patches for estimating the human pose. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing to the state-of-the-art human-pose estimation methods based on pose priors that are estimated from physiologically inspired graphical models or learned from a holistic perspective.Comment: CVPR 201