Hybrid model for Single-Stage Multi-Person Pose Estimation

In general, human pose estimation methods are categorized into two approaches according to their architectures: regression (i.e., heatmap-free) and heatmap-based methods. The former one directly estimates precise coordinates of each keypoint using convolutional and fully-connected layers. Although this approach is able to detect overlapped and dense keypoints, unexpected results can be obtained by non-existent keypoints in a scene. On the other hand, the latter one is able to filter the non-existent ones out by utilizing predicted heatmaps for each keypoint. Nevertheless, it suffers from quantization error when obtaining the keypoint coordinates from its heatmaps. In addition, unlike the regression one, it is difficult to distinguish densely placed keypoints in an image. To this end, we propose a hybrid model for single-stage multi-person pose estimation, named HybridPose, which mutually overcomes each drawback of both approaches by maximizing their strengths. Furthermore, we introduce self-correlation loss to inject spatial dependencies between keypoint coordinates and their visibility. Therefore, HybridPose is capable of not only detecting densely placed keypoints, but also filtering the non-existent keypoints in an image. Experimental results demonstrate that proposed HybridPose exhibits the keypoints visibility without performance degradation in terms of the pose estimation accuracy

Mesh Represented Recycle Learning for 3D Hand Pose and Mesh Estimation

In general, hand pose estimation aims to improve the robustness of model performance in the real-world scenes. However, it is difficult to enhance the robustness since existing datasets are obtained in restricted environments to annotate 3D information. Although neural networks quantitatively achieve a high estimation accuracy, unsatisfied results can be observed in visual quality. This discrepancy between quantitative results and their visual qualities remains an open issue in the hand pose representation. To this end, we propose a mesh represented recycle learning strategy for 3D hand pose and mesh estimation which reinforces synthesized hand mesh representation in a training phase. To be specific, a hand pose and mesh estimation model first predicts parametric 3D hand annotations (i.e., 3D keypoint positions and vertices for hand mesh) with real-world hand images in the training phase. Second, synthetic hand images are generated with self-estimated hand mesh representations. After that, the synthetic hand images are fed into the same model again. Thus, the proposed learning strategy simultaneously improves quantitative results and visual qualities by reinforcing synthetic mesh representation. To encourage consistency between original model output and its recycled one, we propose self-correlation loss which maximizes the accuracy and reliability of our learning strategy. Consequently, the model effectively conducts self-refinement on hand pose estimation by learning mesh representation from its own output. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our learning strategy, we provide extensive experiments on FreiHAND dataset. Notably, our learning strategy improves the performance on hand pose and mesh estimation without any extra computational burden during the inference