In this paper, we are interested in bottom-up multi-person human pose estimation. A typical bottom-up pipeline consists of two main steps: heatmap prediction and keypoint grouping. We mainly focus on the first step for improving heatmap prediction accuracy. We propose Higher-Resolution Network (HigherHRNet), which is a simple extension of the High-Resolution Network (HRNet). HigherHRNet generates higher-resolution feature maps by deconvolving the high-resolution feature maps outputted by HRNet, which are spatially more accurate for small and medium persons. Then, we build high-quality multi-level features and perform multi-scale pose prediction. The extra computation overhead is marginal and negligible in comparison to existing bottom-up methods that rely on multi-scale image pyramids or large input image size to generate accurate pose heatmaps. HigherHRNet surpasses all existing bottom-up methods on the COCO dataset without using multi-scale test. The code and models will be released.
Bottom-up methods @cite_11 @cite_27 @cite_8 @cite_17 @cite_12 detect identity-free body joints for all the persons in an image and then group them into individuals. OpenPose @cite_17 uses a two-branch multi-stage netork with one branch for heatmap prediction and one branch for grouping. OpenPose uses a grouping method named part affinity field which learns a 2D vector field linking two keypoints. Grouping is done by calculating line integral between two keypoints and group the pair with the largest integral. Newell @cite_12 use stacked hourglass network @cite_30 for both heatmap prediction and grouping. Grouping is done by a method named associate embedding, which assigns each keypoint with a tag'' (a vector representation) and groups keypoints based on the @math distance between tag vectors. PersonLab @cite_1 uses dilated ResNet @cite_5 and groups keypoints by directly learning a 2D offset field for each pair of keypoints.
@cite_30 @cite_11 @cite_8 @cite_1 @cite_27 @cite_5 @cite_12 @cite_17
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Bourdev and Malik (ICCV 09) introduced a new notion of parts, poselets, constructed to be tightly clustered both in the configuration space of keypoints, as well as in the appearance space of image patches. In this paper we develop a new algorithm for detecting people using poselets. Unlike that work which used 3D annotations of keypoints, we use only 2D annotations which are much easier for naive human annotators. The main algorithmic contribution is in how we use the pattern of poselet activations. Individual poselet activations are noisy, but considering the spatial context of each can provide vital disambiguating information, just as object detection can be improved by considering the detection scores of nearby objects in the scene. This can be done by training a two-layer feed-forward network with weights set using a max margin technique. The refined poselet activations are then clustered into mutually consistent hypotheses where consistency is based on empirically determined spatial keypoint distributions. Finally, bounding boxes are predicted for each person hypothesis and shape masks are aligned to edges in the image to provide a segmentation. To the best of our knowledge, the resulting system is the current best performer on the task of people detection and segmentation with an average precision of 47.8 and 40.5 respectively on PASCAL VOC 2009. We present an approach to efficiently detect the 2D pose of multiple people in an image. The approach uses a nonparametric representation, which we refer to as Part Affinity Fields (PAFs), to learn to associate body parts with individuals in the image. The architecture encodes global context, allowing a greedy bottom-up parsing step that maintains high accuracy while achieving realtime performance, irrespective of the number of people in the image. The architecture is designed to jointly learn part locations and their association via two branches of the same sequential prediction process. Our method placed first in the inaugural COCO 2016 keypoints challenge, and significantly exceeds the previous state-of-the-art result on the MPII Multi-Person benchmark, both in performance and efficiency. We present an approach to efficiently detect the 2D pose of multiple people in an image. The approach uses a nonparametric representation, which we refer to as Part Affinity Fields (PAFs), to learn to associate body parts with individuals in the image. The architecture encodes global context, allowing a greedy bottom-up parsing step that maintains high accuracy while achieving realtime performance, irrespective of the number of people in the image. The architecture is designed to jointly learn part locations and their association via two branches of the same sequential prediction process. Our method placed first in the inaugural COCO 2016 keypoints challenge, and significantly exceeds the previous state-of-the-art result on the MPII Multi-Person benchmark, both in performance and efficiency. We present a box-free bottom-up approach for the tasks of pose estimation and instance segmentation of people in multi-person images using an efficient single-shot model. The proposed PersonLab model tackles both semantic-level reasoning and object-part associations using part-based modeling. Our model employs a convolutional network which learns to detect individual keypoints and predict their relative displacements, allowing us to group keypoints into person pose instances. Further, we propose a part-induced geometric embedding descriptor which allows us to associate semantic person pixels with their corresponding person instance, delivering instance-level person segmentations. Our system is based on a fully-convolutional architecture and allows for efficient inference, with runtime essentially independent of the number of people present in the scene. Trained on COCO data alone, our system achieves COCO test-dev keypoint average precision of 0.665 using single-scale inference and 0.687 using multi-scale inference, significantly outperforming all previous bottom-up pose estimation systems. We are also the first bottom-up method to report competitive results for the person class in the COCO instance segmentation task, achieving a person category average precision of 0.417.