Flowing ConvNets for Human Pose Estimation in Videos

The objective of this work is human pose estimation in videos, where multiple frames are available. We investigate a ConvNet architecture that is able to benefit from temporal context by combining information across the multiple frames using optical flow. To this end we propose a network architecture with the following novelties: (i) a deeper network than previously investigated for regressing heatmaps; (ii) spatial fusion layers that learn an implicit spatial model; (iii) optical flow is used to align heatmap predictions from neighbouring frames; and (iv) a final parametric pooling layer which learns to combine the aligned heatmaps into a pooled confidence map. We show that this architecture outperforms a number of others, including one that uses optical flow solely at the input layers, one that regresses joint coordinates directly, and one that predicts heatmaps without spatial fusion. The new architecture outperforms the state of the art by a large margin on three video pose estimation datasets, including the very challenging Poses in the Wild dataset, and outperforms other deep methods that don't use a graphical model on the single-image FLIC benchmark (and also Chen & Yuille and Tompson et al. in the high precision region).Comment: ICCV'1

VIBE: Video Inference for Human Body Pose and Shape Estimation

Human motion is fundamental to understanding behavior. Despite progress on single-image 3D pose and shape estimation, existing video-based state-of-the-art methods fail to produce accurate and natural motion sequences due to a lack of ground-truth 3D motion data for training. To address this problem, we propose Video Inference for Body Pose and Shape Estimation (VIBE), which makes use of an existing large-scale motion capture dataset (AMASS) together with unpaired, in-the-wild, 2D keypoint annotations. Our key novelty is an adversarial learning framework that leverages AMASS to discriminate between real human motions and those produced by our temporal pose and shape regression networks. We define a temporal network architecture and show that adversarial training, at the sequence level, produces kinematically plausible motion sequences without in-the-wild ground-truth 3D labels. We perform extensive experimentation to analyze the importance of motion and demonstrate the effectiveness of VIBE on challenging 3D pose estimation datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/mkocabas/VIBE.Comment: CVPR-2020 camera ready. Code is available at https://github.com/mkocabas/VIB

Detect-and-Track: Efficient Pose Estimation in Videos

This paper addresses the problem of estimating and tracking human body keypoints in complex, multi-person video. We propose an extremely lightweight yet highly effective approach that builds upon the latest advancements in human detection and video understanding. Our method operates in two-stages: keypoint estimation in frames or short clips, followed by lightweight tracking to generate keypoint predictions linked over the entire video. For frame-level pose estimation we experiment with Mask R-CNN, as well as our own proposed 3D extension of this model, which leverages temporal information over small clips to generate more robust frame predictions. We conduct extensive ablative experiments on the newly released multi-person video pose estimation benchmark, PoseTrack, to validate various design choices of our model. Our approach achieves an accuracy of 55.2% on the validation and 51.8% on the test set using the Multi-Object Tracking Accuracy (MOTA) metric, and achieves state of the art performance on the ICCV 2017 PoseTrack keypoint tracking challenge.Comment: In CVPR 2018. Ranked first in ICCV 2017 PoseTrack challenge (keypoint tracking in videos). Code: https://github.com/facebookresearch/DetectAndTrack and webpage: https://rohitgirdhar.github.io/DetectAndTrack

PoseTrack: A Benchmark for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking

Human poses and motions are important cues for analysis of videos with people and there is strong evidence that representations based on body pose are highly effective for a variety of tasks such as activity recognition, content retrieval and social signal processing. In this work, we aim to further advance the state of the art by establishing "PoseTrack", a new large-scale benchmark for video-based human pose estimation and articulated tracking, and bringing together the community of researchers working on visual human analysis. The benchmark encompasses three competition tracks focusing on i) single-frame multi-person pose estimation, ii) multi-person pose estimation in videos, and iii) multi-person articulated tracking. To facilitate the benchmark and challenge we collect, annotate and release a new %large-scale benchmark dataset that features videos with multiple people labeled with person tracks and articulated pose. A centralized evaluation server is provided to allow participants to evaluate on a held-out test set. We envision that the proposed benchmark will stimulate productive research both by providing a large and representative training dataset as well as providing a platform to objectively evaluate and compare the proposed methods. The benchmark is freely accessible at https://posetrack.net.Comment: www.posetrack.ne

Learnable PINs: Cross-Modal Embeddings for Person Identity

We propose and investigate an identity sensitive joint embedding of face and voice. Such an embedding enables cross-modal retrieval from voice to face and from face to voice. We make the following four contributions: first, we show that the embedding can be learnt from videos of talking faces, without requiring any identity labels, using a form of cross-modal self-supervision; second, we develop a curriculum learning schedule for hard negative mining targeted to this task, that is essential for learning to proceed successfully; third, we demonstrate and evaluate cross-modal retrieval for identities unseen and unheard during training over a number of scenarios and establish a benchmark for this novel task; finally, we show an application of using the joint embedding for automatically retrieving and labelling characters in TV dramas.Comment: To appear in ECCV 201