Despite the large improvements in performance attained by using deep learning
in computer vision, one can often further improve results with some additional
post-processing that exploits the geometric nature of the underlying task. This
commonly involves displacing the posterior distribution of a CNN in a way that
makes it more appropriate for the task at hand, e.g. better aligned with local
image features, or more compact. In this work we integrate this geometric
post-processing within a deep architecture, introducing a differentiable and
probabilistically sound counterpart to the common geometric voting technique
used for evidence accumulation in vision. We refer to the resulting neural
models as Mass Displacement Networks (MDNs), and apply them to human pose
estimation in two distinct setups: (a) landmark localization, where we collapse
a distribution to a point, allowing for precise localization of body keypoints
and (b) communication across body parts, where we transfer evidence from one
part to the other, allowing for a globally consistent pose estimate. We
evaluate on large-scale pose estimation benchmarks, such as MPII Human Pose and
COCO datasets, and report systematic improvements when compared to strong
baselines.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure