V2V-PoseNet: Voxel-to-Voxel Prediction Network for Accurate 3D Hand and Human Pose Estimation from a Single Depth Map

Most of the existing deep learning-based methods for 3D hand and human pose estimation from a single depth map are based on a common framework that takes a 2D depth map and directly regresses the 3D coordinates of keypoints, such as hand or human body joints, via 2D convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The first weakness of this approach is the presence of perspective distortion in the 2D depth map. While the depth map is intrinsically 3D data, many previous methods treat depth maps as 2D images that can distort the shape of the actual object through projection from 3D to 2D space. This compels the network to perform perspective distortion-invariant estimation. The second weakness of the conventional approach is that directly regressing 3D coordinates from a 2D image is a highly non-linear mapping, which causes difficulty in the learning procedure. To overcome these weaknesses, we firstly cast the 3D hand and human pose estimation problem from a single depth map into a voxel-to-voxel prediction that uses a 3D voxelized grid and estimates the per-voxel likelihood for each keypoint. We design our model as a 3D CNN that provides accurate estimates while running in real-time. Our system outperforms previous methods in almost all publicly available 3D hand and human pose estimation datasets and placed first in the HANDS 2017 frame-based 3D hand pose estimation challenge. The code is available in https://github.com/mks0601/V2V-PoseNet_RELEASE.Comment: HANDS 2017 Challenge Frame-based 3D Hand Pose Estimation Winner (ICCV 2017), Published at CVPR 201

In the Wild Human Pose Estimation Using Explicit 2D Features and Intermediate 3D Representations

Convolutional Neural Network based approaches for monocular 3D human pose estimation usually require a large amount of training images with 3D pose annotations. While it is feasible to provide 2D joint annotations for large corpora of in-the-wild images with humans, providing accurate 3D annotations to such in-the-wild corpora is hardly feasible in practice. Most existing 3D labelled data sets are either synthetically created or feature in-studio images. 3D pose estimation algorithms trained on such data often have limited ability to generalize to real world scene diversity. We therefore propose a new deep learning based method for monocular 3D human pose estimation that shows high accuracy and generalizes better to in-the-wild scenes. It has a network architecture that comprises a new disentangled hidden space encoding of explicit 2D and 3D features, and uses supervision by a new learned projection model from predicted 3D pose. Our algorithm can be jointly trained on image data with 3D labels and image data with only 2D labels. It achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on challenging in-the-wild data.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 201

In the Wild Human Pose Estimation Using Explicit 2D Features and Intermediate 3D Representations

Convolutional Neural Network based approaches for monocular 3D human pose estimation usually require a large amount of training images with 3D pose annotations. While it is feasible to provide 2D joint annotations for large corpora of in-the-wild images with humans, providing accurate 3D annotations to such in-the-wild corpora is hardly feasible in practice. Most existing 3D labelled data sets are either synthetically created or feature in-studio images. 3D pose estimation algorithms trained on such data often have limited ability to generalize to real world scene diversity. We therefore propose a new deep learning based method for monocular 3D human pose estimation that shows high accuracy and generalizes better to in-the-wild scenes. It has a network architecture that comprises a new disentangled hidden space encoding of explicit 2D and 3D features, and uses supervision by a new learned projection model from predicted 3D pose. Our algorithm can be jointly trained on image data with 3D labels and image data with only 2D labels. It achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on challenging in-the-wild data