This paper presents an approach to parsing humans when there is significant occlusion. We model humans using a graphical model which has a tree structure building on recent work [32, 6] and exploit the connectivity prior that, even in presence of occlusion, the visible nodes form a connected subtree of the graphical model. We call each connected subtree a flexible composition of object parts. This involves a novel method for learning occlusion cues. During inference we need to search over a mixture of different flexible models. By exploiting part sharing, we show that this inference can be done extremely efficiently requiring only twice as many computations as searching for the entire object (i.e., not modeling occlusion). We evaluate our model on the standard benchmarked "We Are Family" Stickmen dataset and obtain significant performance improvements over the best alternative algorithms.
Our approach models object occlusion effectively uses a mixture of models to deal with different occlusion patterns. There is considerable work which models objects using mixtures to deal with different configurations, see Poselets @cite_19 which uses many mixtures to deal with different object configurations, and deformable part models (DPMs) @cite_11 where mixtures are used to deal with different viewpoints.
@cite_19 @cite_11
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Occlusion poses a significant difficulty for object recognition due to the combinatorial diversity of possible occlusion patterns. We take a strongly supervised, non-parametric approach to modeling occlusion by learning deformable models with many local part mixture templates using large quantities of synthetically generated training data. This allows the model to learn the appearance of different occlusion patterns including figure-ground cues such as the shapes of occluding contours as well as the co-occurrence statistics of occlusion between neighboring parts. The underlying part mixture-structure also allows the model to capture coherence of object support masks between neighboring parts and make compelling predictions of figure-ground-occluder segmentations. We test the resulting model on human pose estimation under heavy occlusion and find it produces improved localization accuracy. Part-based models have demonstrated their merit in object detection. However, there is a key issue to be solved on how to integrate the inaccurate scores of part detectors when there are occlusions or large deformations. To handle the imperfectness of part detectors, this paper presents a probabilistic pedestrian detection framework. In this framework, a deformable part-based model is used to obtain the scores of part detectors and the visibilities of parts are modeled as hidden variables. Unlike previous occlusion handling approaches that assume independence among visibility probabilities of parts or manually define rules for the visibility relationship, a discriminative deep model is used in this paper for learning the visibility relationship among overlapping parts at multiple layers. Experimental results on three public datasets (Caltech, ETH and Daimler) and a new CUHK occlusion dataset1 specially designed for the evaluation of occlusion handling approaches show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Occlusion presents a challenge for detecting objects in real world applications. To address this issue, this paper models object occlusion with an AND-OR structure which (i) represents occlusion at semantic part level, and (ii) captures the regularities of different occlusion configurations (i.e., the different combinations of object part visibilities). This paper focuses on car detection on street. Since annotating part occlusion on real images is time-consuming and error-prone, we propose to learn the the AND-OR structure automatically using synthetic images of CAD models placed at different relative positions. The model parameters are learned from real images under the latent structural SVM (LSSVM) framework. In inference, an efficient dynamic programming (DP) algorithm is utilized. In experiments, we test our method on both car detection and car view estimation. Experimental results show that (i) Our CAD simulation strategy is capable of generating occlusion patterns for real scenarios, (ii) The proposed AND-OR structure model is effective for modeling occlusions, which outperforms the deformable part-based model (DPM) DPM, voc5 in car detection on both our self-collected street parking dataset and the Pascal VOC 2007 car dataset pascal-voc-2007 , (iii) The learned model is on-par with the state-of-the-art methods on car view estimation tested on two public datasets. To enhance the robotic manipulation of deformable objects, a robust state estimator is proposed to track the object configuration in real time. A Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is constructed to register the object nodes towards the noisy point cloud. To deal with occlusion, the coherent point drift (CPD) regularization is applied on the mixture model, so as to maintain the topological structure from previous sequences of data and to infer the object states in occluded area. The state estimation is further refined by running a dynamic simulation in parallel, which guarantees the estimates to satisfy the object's physical constraints. A series of rope tracking experiments are performed to evaluate the proposed state estimator. It is shown that the object can be tracked robustly with sensor noise, outliers and massive occlusion.