We propose a new bottom-up method for multi-person 2D human pose estimation that is particularly well suited for urban mobility such as self-driving cars and delivery robots. The new method, PifPaf, uses a Part Intensity Field (PIF) to localize body parts and a Part Association Field (PAF) to associate body parts with each other to form full human poses. Our method outperforms previous methods at low resolution and in crowded, cluttered and occluded scenes thanks to (i) our new composite field PAF encoding fine-grained information and (ii) the choice of Laplace loss for regressions which incorporates a notion of uncertainty. Our architecture is based on a fully convolutional, single-shot, box-free design. We perform on par with the existing state-of-the-art bottom-up method on the standard COCO keypoint task and produce state-of-the-art results on a modified COCO keypoint task for the transportation domain.
Over the past years, state-of-the-art methods for pose estimation are based on Convolutional Neural Networks @cite_1 @cite_37 @cite_3 @cite_25 . They outperform traditional methods based on pictorial structures @cite_30 @cite_24 @cite_36 and deformable part models @cite_13 . The deep learning tsunami started with DeepPose @cite_31 that uses a cascade of convolutional networks for full-body pose estimation. Then, instead of predicting absolute human joint locations, some works refine pose estimates by predicting error feedback ( , corrections) at each iteration @cite_40 @cite_6 or using a human pose refinement network to exploit dependencies between input and output spaces @cite_27 . There is now an arms race towards proposing alternative neural network architectures: from convolutional pose machines @cite_42 , stacked hourglass networks @cite_41 @cite_35 , to recurrent networks @cite_0 , and voting schemes such as @cite_2 .
@cite_30 @cite_35 @cite_37 @cite_36 @cite_41 @cite_42 @cite_1 @cite_3 @cite_6 @cite_24 @cite_0 @cite_40 @cite_27 @cite_2 @cite_31 @cite_13 @cite_25
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Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs)-based methods for 3D hand pose estimation with depth cameras usually take 2D depth images as input and directly regress holistic 3D hand pose. Different from these methods, our proposed Point-to-Point Regression PointNet directly takes the 3D point cloud as input and outputs point-wise estimations, i.e., heat-maps and unit vector fields on the point cloud, representing the closeness and direction from every point in the point cloud to the hand joint. The point-wise estimations are used to infer 3D joint locations with weighted fusion. To better capture 3D spatial information in the point cloud, we apply a stacked network architecture for PointNet with intermediate supervision, which is trained end-to-end. Experiments show that our method can achieve outstanding results when compared with state-of-the-art methods on three challenging hand pose datasets. Recently, Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have been applied to the task of human pose estimation, and have shown its potential of learning better feature representations and capturing contextual relationships. However, it is difficult to incorporate domain prior knowledge such as geometric relationships among body parts into DCNNs. In addition, training DCNN-based body part detectors without consideration of global body joint consistency introduces ambiguities, which increases the complexity of training. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end framework for human pose estimation that combines DCNNs with the expressive deformable mixture of parts. We explicitly incorporate domain prior knowledge into the framework, which greatly regularizes the learning process and enables the flexibility of our framework for loopy models or tree-structured models. The effectiveness of jointly learning a DCNN with a deformable mixture of parts model is evaluated through intensive experiments on several widely used benchmarks. The proposed approach significantly improves the performance compared with state-of-the-art approaches, especially on benchmarks with challenging articulations. We propose a novel approach to 3D human pose estimation from a single depth map. Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has become a powerful paradigm in computer vision. Many of computer vision tasks have benefited from CNNs, however, the conventional approach to directly regress 3D body joint locations from an image does not yield a noticeably improved performance. In contrast, we formulate the problem as estimating per-voxel likelihood of key body joints from a 3D occupancy grid. We argue that learning a mapping from volumetric input to volumetric output with 3D convolution consistently improves the accuracy when compared to learning a regression from depth map to 3D joint coordinates. We propose a two-stage approach to reduce the computational overhead caused by volumetric representation and 3D convolution: Holistic 2D prediction and Local 3D prediction. In the first stage, Planimetric Network (P-Net) estimates per-pixel likelihood for each body joint in the holistic 2D space. In the second stage, Volumetric Network (V-Net) estimates the per-voxel likelihood of each body joints in the local 3D space around the 2D estimations of the first stage, effectively reducing the computational cost. Our model outperforms existing methods by a large margin in publicly available datasets. In this paper, we propose a deep convolutional neural network for 3D human pose estimation from monocular images. We train the network using two strategies: (1) a multi-task framework that jointly trains pose regression and body part detectors; (2) a pre-training strategy where the pose regressor is initialized using a network trained for body part detection. We compare our network on a large data set and achieve significant improvement over baseline methods. Human pose estimation is a structured prediction problem, i.e., the locations of each body part are highly correlated. Although we do not add constraints about the correlations between body parts to the network, we empirically show that the network has disentangled the dependencies among different body parts, and learned their correlations.