3D human pose estimation from depth maps using a deep combination of poses

Many real-world applications require the estimation of human body joints for higher-level tasks as, for example, human behaviour understanding. In recent years, depth sensors have become a popular approach to obtain three-dimensional information. The depth maps generated by these sensors provide information that can be employed to disambiguate the poses observed in two-dimensional images. This work addresses the problem of 3D human pose estimation from depth maps employing a Deep Learning approach. We propose a model, named Deep Depth Pose (DDP), which receives a depth map containing a person and a set of predefined 3D prototype poses and returns the 3D position of the body joints of the person. In particular, DDP is defined as a ConvNet that computes the specific weights needed to linearly combine the prototypes for the given input. We have thoroughly evaluated DDP on the challenging 'ITOP' and 'UBC3V' datasets, which respectively depict realistic and synthetic samples, defining a new state-of-the-art on them.Comment: Accepted for publication at "Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation

Real-Time Human Motion Capture with Multiple Depth Cameras

Commonly used human motion capture systems require intrusive attachment of markers that are visually tracked with multiple cameras. In this work we present an efficient and inexpensive solution to markerless motion capture using only a few Kinect sensors. Unlike the previous work on 3d pose estimation using a single depth camera, we relax constraints on the camera location and do not assume a co-operative user. We apply recent image segmentation techniques to depth images and use curriculum learning to train our system on purely synthetic data. Our method accurately localizes body parts without requiring an explicit shape model. The body joint locations are then recovered by combining evidence from multiple views in real-time. We also introduce a dataset of ~6 million synthetic depth frames for pose estimation from multiple cameras and exceed state-of-the-art results on the Berkeley MHAD dataset.Comment: Accepted to computer robot vision 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