For human pose estimation in still images, this paper proposes three semi- and weakly-supervised learning schemes. While recent advances of convolutional neural networks improve human pose estimation using supervised training data, our focus is to explore the semi- and weakly-supervised schemes. Our proposed schemes initially learn conventional model(s) for pose estimation from a small amount of standard training images with human pose annotations. For the first semi-supervised learning scheme, this conventional pose model detects candidate poses in training images with no human annotation. From these candidate poses, only true-positives are selected by a classifier using a pose feature representing the configuration of all body parts. The accuracies of these candidate pose estimation and true-positive pose selection are improved by action labels provided to these images in our second and third learning schemes, which are semi- and weakly-supervised learning. While the first and second learning schemes select only poses that are similar to those in the supervised training data, the third scheme selects more true-positive poses that are significantly different from any supervised poses. This pose selection is achieved by pose clustering using outlier pose detection with Dirichlet process mixtures and the Bayes factor. The proposed schemes are validated with large-scale human pose datasets.
A number of methods for human pose estimation employed (1) deformable part models (e.g., pictorial structure models @cite_48 ) for globally-optimizing an articulated human body and (2) discriminative learning for optimizing the parameters of the models @cite_68 . In general, part connectivity in a deformable part model is defined by image-independent quadratic functions for efficient optimization via distance transform. Image-dependent functions (e.g., @cite_60 @cite_46 ) disable distance transform but improve pose estimation accuracy. In @cite_11 , on the other hand, image-dependent but quadratic functions enable distance transform for representing the relative positions between neighboring parts.
@cite_60 @cite_48 @cite_46 @cite_68 @cite_11
2013640163 2143478373 2159185518 2084106378
We describe a method for articulated human detection and human pose estimation in static images based on a new representation of deformable part models. Rather than modeling articulation using a family of warped (rotated and foreshortened) templates, we use a mixture of small, nonoriented parts. We describe a general, flexible mixture model that jointly captures spatial relations between part locations and co-occurrence relations between part mixtures, augmenting standard pictorial structure models that encode just spatial relations. Our models have several notable properties: 1) They efficiently model articulation by sharing computation across similar warps, 2) they efficiently model an exponentially large set of global mixtures through composition of local mixtures, and 3) they capture the dependency of global geometry on local appearance (parts look different at different locations). When relations are tree structured, our models can be efficiently optimized with dynamic programming. We learn all parameters, including local appearances, spatial relations, and co-occurrence relations (which encode local rigidity) with a structured SVM solver. Because our model is efficient enough to be used as a detector that searches over scales and image locations, we introduce novel criteria for evaluating pose estimation and human detection, both separately and jointly. We show that currently used evaluation criteria may conflate these two issues. Most previous approaches model limbs with rigid and articulated templates that are trained independently of each other, while we present an extensive diagnostic evaluation that suggests that flexible structure and joint training are crucial for strong performance. We present experimental results on standard benchmarks that suggest our approach is the state-of-the-art system for pose estimation, improving past work on the challenging Parse and Buffy datasets while being orders of magnitude faster. In this work, we address the problem of estimating 2d human pose from still images. Recent methods that rely on discriminatively trained deformable parts organized in a tree model have shown to be very successful in solving this task. Within such a pictorial structure framework, we address the problem of obtaining good part templates by proposing novel, non-linear joint regressors. In particular, we employ two-layered random forests as joint regressors. The first layer acts as a discriminative, independent body part classifier. The second layer takes the estimated class distributions of the first one into account and is thereby able to predict joint locations by modeling the interdependence and co-occurrence of the parts. This results in a pose estimation framework that takes dependencies between body parts already for joint localization into account and is thus able to circumvent typical ambiguities of tree structures, such as for legs and arms. In the experiments, we demonstrate that our body parts dependent joint regressors achieve a higher joint localization accuracy than tree-based state-of-the-art methods. We address the problem of estimating human pose in a single image using a part based approach. Pose accuracy is directly affected by the accuracy of the part detectors but more accurate detectors are likely to be also more computationally expensive. We propose to use multiple, heterogeneous part detectors with varying accuracy and computation requirements, ordered in a hierarchy, to achieve more accurate and efficient pose estimation. For inference, we propose an algorithm to localize articulated objects by exploiting an ordered hierarchy of detectors with increasing accuracy. The inference uses branch and bound method to search for each part and use kinematics from neighboring parts to guide the branching behavior and compute bounds on the best part estimate. We demonstrate our approach on a publicly available People dataset and outperform the state-of-art methods. Our inference is 3 times faster than one based on using a single, highly accurate detector. In this paper we consider people detection and articulated pose estimation, two closely related and challenging problems in computer vision. Conceptually, both of these problems can be addressed within the pictorial structures framework (Felzenszwalb and Huttenlocher in Int. J. Comput. Vis. 61(1):55---79, 2005; Fischler and Elschlager in IEEE Trans. Comput. C-22(1):67---92, 1973), even though previous approaches have not shown such generality. A principal difficulty for such a general approach is to model the appearance of body parts. The model has to be discriminative enough to enable reliable detection in cluttered scenes and general enough to capture highly variable appearance. Therefore, as the first important component of our approach, we propose a discriminative appearance model based on densely sampled local descriptors and AdaBoost classifiers. Secondly, we interpret the normalized margin of each classifier as likelihood in a generative model and compute marginal posteriors for each part using belief propagation. Thirdly, non-Gaussian relationships between parts are represented as Gaussians in the coordinate system of the joint between the parts. Additionally, in order to cope with shortcomings of tree-based pictorial structures models, we augment our model with additional repulsive factors in order to discourage overcounting of image evidence. We demonstrate that the combination of these components within the pictorial structures framework results in a generic model that yields state-of-the-art performance for several datasets on a variety of tasks: people detection, upper body pose estimation, and full body pose estimation.