Harvesting Multiple Views for Marker-less 3D Human Pose Annotations

Recent advances with Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) have shifted the bottleneck for many computer vision tasks to annotated data collection. In this paper, we present a geometry-driven approach to automatically collect annotations for human pose prediction tasks. Starting from a generic ConvNet for 2D human pose, and assuming a multi-view setup, we describe an automatic way to collect accurate 3D human pose annotations. We capitalize on constraints offered by the 3D geometry of the camera setup and the 3D structure of the human body to probabilistically combine per view 2D ConvNet predictions into a globally optimal 3D pose. This 3D pose is used as the basis for harvesting annotations. The benefit of the annotations produced automatically with our approach is demonstrated in two challenging settings: (i) fine-tuning a generic ConvNet-based 2D pose predictor to capture the discriminative aspects of a subject's appearance (i.e.,"personalization"), and (ii) training a ConvNet from scratch for single view 3D human pose prediction without leveraging 3D pose groundtruth. The proposed multi-view pose estimator achieves state-of-the-art results on standard benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method in exploiting the available multi-view information.Comment: CVPR 2017 Camera Read

Discovering useful parts for pose estimation in sparsely annotated datasets

Our work introduces a novel way to increase pose estimation accuracy by discovering parts from unannotated regions of training images. Discovered parts are used to generate more accurate appearance likelihoods for traditional part-based models like Pictorial Structures and its derivatives. Our experiments on images of a hawkmoth in flight show that our proposed approach significantly improves over existing work for this application, while also being more generally applicable. Our proposed approach localizes landmarks at least twice as accurately as a baseline based on a Mixture of Pictorial Structures (MPS) model. Our unique High-Resolution Moth Flight (HRMF) dataset is made publicly available with annotations.https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.00707Accepted manuscrip

Articulated Clinician Detection Using 3D Pictorial Structures on RGB-D Data

Reliable human pose estimation (HPE) is essential to many clinical applications, such as surgical workflow analysis, radiation safety monitoring and human-robot cooperation. Proposed methods for the operating room (OR) rely either on foreground estimation using a multi-camera system, which is a challenge in real ORs due to color similarities and frequent illumination changes, or on wearable sensors or markers, which are invasive and therefore difficult to introduce in the room. Instead, we propose a novel approach based on Pictorial Structures (PS) and on RGB-D data, which can be easily deployed in real ORs. We extend the PS framework in two ways. First, we build robust and discriminative part detectors using both color and depth images. We also present a novel descriptor for depth images, called histogram of depth differences (HDD). Second, we extend PS to 3D by proposing 3D pairwise constraints and a new method that makes exact inference tractable. Our approach is evaluated for pose estimation and clinician detection on a challenging RGB-D dataset recorded in a busy operating room during live surgeries. We conduct series of experiments to study the different part detectors in conjunction with the various 2D or 3D pairwise constraints. Our comparisons demonstrate that 3D PS with RGB-D part detectors significantly improves the results in a visually challenging operating environment.Comment: The supplementary video is available at https://youtu.be/iabbGSqRSg

Joint Training of a Convolutional Network and a Graphical Model for Human Pose Estimation

This paper proposes a new hybrid architecture that consists of a deep Convolutional Network and a Markov Random Field. We show how this architecture is successfully applied to the challenging problem of articulated human pose estimation in monocular images. The architecture can exploit structural domain constraints such as geometric relationships between body joint locations. We show that joint training of these two model paradigms improves performance and allows us to significantly outperform existing state-of-the-art techniques

Multi-Person Pose Estimation with Local Joint-to-Person Associations

Despite of the recent success of neural networks for human pose estimation, current approaches are limited to pose estimation of a single person and cannot handle humans in groups or crowds. In this work, we propose a method that estimates the poses of multiple persons in an image in which a person can be occluded by another person or might be truncated. To this end, we consider multi-person pose estimation as a joint-to-person association problem. We construct a fully connected graph from a set of detected joint candidates in an image and resolve the joint-to-person association and outlier detection using integer linear programming. Since solving joint-to-person association jointly for all persons in an image is an NP-hard problem and even approximations are expensive, we solve the problem locally for each person. On the challenging MPII Human Pose Dataset for multiple persons, our approach achieves the accuracy of a state-of-the-art method, but it is 6,000 to 19,000 times faster.Comment: Accepted to European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) Workshops, Crowd Understanding, 201

MoDeep: A Deep Learning Framework Using Motion Features for Human Pose Estimation

In this work, we propose a novel and efficient method for articulated human pose estimation in videos using a convolutional network architecture, which incorporates both color and motion features. We propose a new human body pose dataset, FLIC-motion, that extends the FLIC dataset with additional motion features. We apply our architecture to this dataset and report significantly better performance than current state-of-the-art pose detection systems

Human Pose Estimation from Monocular Images : a Comprehensive Survey

Human pose estimation refers to the estimation of the location of body parts and how they are connected in an image. Human pose estimation from monocular images has wide applications (e.g., image indexing). Several surveys on human pose estimation can be found in the literature, but they focus on a certain category; for example, model-based approaches or human motion analysis, etc. As far as we know, an overall review of this problem domain has yet to be provided. Furthermore, recent advancements based on deep learning have brought novel algorithms for this problem. In this paper, a comprehensive survey of human pose estimation from monocular images is carried out including milestone works and recent advancements. Based on one standard pipeline for the solution of computer vision problems, this survey splits the problema into several modules: feature extraction and description, human body models, and modelin methods. Problem modeling methods are approached based on two means of categorization in this survey. One way to categorize includes top-down and bottom-up methods, and another way includes generative and discriminative methods. Considering the fact that one direct application of human pose estimation is to provide initialization for automatic video surveillance, there are additional sections for motion-related methods in all modules: motion features, motion models, and motion-based methods. Finally, the paper also collects 26 publicly available data sets for validation and provides error measurement methods that are frequently used