Learning Generative Models for Multi-Activity Body Pose Estimation

We present a method to simultaneously estimate 3D body pose and action categories from monocular video sequences. Our approach learns a generative model of the relationship of body pose and image appearance using a sparse kernel regressor. Body poses are modelled on a low-dimensional manifold obtained by Locally Linear Embedding dimensionality reduction. In addition, we learn a prior model of likely body poses and a dynamical model in this pose manifold. Sparse kernel regressors capture the nonlinearities of this mapping efficiently. Within a Recursive Bayesian Sampling framework, the potentially multimodal posterior probability distributions can then be inferred. An activity-switching mechanism based on learned transfer functions allows for inference of the performed activity class, along with the estimation of body pose and 2D image location of the subject. Using a rough foreground segmentation, we compare Binary PCA and distance transforms to encode the appearance. As a postprocessing step, the globally optimal trajectory through the entire sequence is estimated, yielding a single pose estimate per frame that is consistent throughout the sequence. We evaluate the algorithm on challenging sequences with subjects that are alternating between running and walking movements. Our experiments show how the dynamical model helps to track through poorly segmented low-resolution image sequences where tracking otherwise fails, while at the same time reliably classifying the activity typ

Self Adversarial Training for Human Pose Estimation

This paper presents a deep learning based approach to the problem of human pose estimation. We employ generative adversarial networks as our learning paradigm in which we set up two stacked hourglass networks with the same architecture, one as the generator and the other as the discriminator. The generator is used as a human pose estimator after the training is done. The discriminator distinguishes ground-truth heatmaps from generated ones, and back-propagates the adversarial loss to the generator. This process enables the generator to learn plausible human body configurations and is shown to be useful for improving the prediction accuracy.Comment: CVPR 2017 Workshop on Visual Understanding of Humans in Crowd Scene and the 1st Look Into Person (LIP) Challeng

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

VNect: Real-time 3D Human Pose Estimation with a Single RGB Camera

We present the first real-time method to capture the full global 3D skeletal pose of a human in a stable, temporally consistent manner using a single RGB camera. Our method combines a new convolutional neural network (CNN) based pose regressor with kinematic skeleton fitting. Our novel fully-convolutional pose formulation regresses 2D and 3D joint positions jointly in real time and does not require tightly cropped input frames. A real-time kinematic skeleton fitting method uses the CNN output to yield temporally stable 3D global pose reconstructions on the basis of a coherent kinematic skeleton. This makes our approach the first monocular RGB method usable in real-time applications such as 3D character control---thus far, the only monocular methods for such applications employed specialized RGB-D cameras. Our method's accuracy is quantitatively on par with the best offline 3D monocular RGB pose estimation methods. Our results are qualitatively comparable to, and sometimes better than, results from monocular RGB-D approaches, such as the Kinect. However, we show that our approach is more broadly applicable than RGB-D solutions, i.e. it works for outdoor scenes, community videos, and low quality commodity RGB cameras.Comment: Accepted to SIGGRAPH 201

Multi-set canonical correlation analysis for 3D abnormal gait behaviour recognition based on virtual sample generation

Small sample dataset and two-dimensional (2D) approach are challenges to vision-based abnormal gait behaviour recognition (AGBR). The lack of three-dimensional (3D) structure of the human body causes 2D based methods to be limited in abnormal gait virtual sample generation (VSG). In this paper, 3D AGBR based on VSG and multi-set canonical correlation analysis (3D-AGRBMCCA) is proposed. First, the unstructured point cloud data of gait are obtained by using a structured light sensor. A 3D parametric body model is then deformed to fit the point cloud data, both in shape and posture. The features of point cloud data are then converted to a high-level structured representation of the body. The parametric body model is used for VSG based on the estimated body pose and shape data. Symmetry virtual samples, pose-perturbation virtual samples and various body-shape virtual samples with multi-views are generated to extend the training samples. The spatial-temporal features of the abnormal gait behaviour from different views, body pose and shape parameters are then extracted by convolutional neural network based Long Short-Term Memory model network. These are projected onto a uniform pattern space using deep learning based multi-set canonical correlation analysis. Experiments on four publicly available datasets show the proposed system performs well under various conditions