We address the problem of 3D human pose estimation from 2D input images using
only weakly supervised training data. Despite showing considerable success for
2D pose estimation, the application of supervised machine learning to 3D pose
estimation in real world images is currently hampered by the lack of varied
training images with corresponding 3D poses. Most existing 3D pose estimation
algorithms train on data that has either been collected in carefully controlled
studio settings or has been generated synthetically. Instead, we take a
different approach, and propose a 3D human pose estimation algorithm that only
requires relative estimates of depth at training time. Such training signal,
although noisy, can be easily collected from crowd annotators, and is of
sufficient quality for enabling successful training and evaluation of 3D pose
algorithms. Our results are competitive with fully supervised regression based
approaches on the Human3.6M dataset, despite using significantly weaker
training data. Our proposed algorithm opens the door to using existing
widespread 2D datasets for 3D pose estimation by allowing fine-tuning with
noisy relative constraints, resulting in more accurate 3D poses.Comment: BMVC 2018. Project page available at
http://www.vision.caltech.edu/~mronchi/projects/RelativePos
