Pose Embeddings: A Deep Architecture for Learning to Match Human Poses

We present a method for learning an embedding that places images of humans in similar poses nearby. This embedding can be used as a direct method of comparing images based on human pose, avoiding potential challenges of estimating body joint positions. Pose embedding learning is formulated under a triplet-based distance criterion. A deep architecture is used to allow learning of a representation capable of making distinctions between different poses. Experiments on human pose matching and retrieval from video data demonstrate the potential of the method

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

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

Optimization for automated assembly of puzzles

The puzzle assembly problem has many application areas such as restoration and reconstruction of archeological findings, repairing of broken objects, solving jigsaw type puzzles, molecular docking problem, etc. The puzzle pieces usually include not only geometrical shape information but also visual information such as texture, color, and continuity of lines. This paper presents a new approach to the puzzle assembly problem that is based on using textural features and geometrical constraints. The texture of a band outside the border of pieces is predicted by inpainting and texture synthesis methods. Feature values are derived from these original and predicted images of pieces. An affinity measure of corresponding pieces is defined and alignment of the puzzle pieces is formulated as an optimization problem where the optimum assembly of the pieces is achieved by maximizing the total affinity measure. An fft based image registration technique is used to speed up the alignment of the pieces. Experimental results are presented on real and artificial data sets

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