This paper addresses the problem of 3D human pose estimation in the wild. A significant challenge is the lack of training data, i.e., 2D images of humans annotated with 3D poses. Such data is necessary to train state-of-the-art CNN architectures. Here, we propose a solution to generate a large set of photorealistic synthetic images of humans with 3D pose annotations. We introduce an image-based synthesis engine that artificially augments a dataset of real images with 2D human pose annotations using 3D Motion Capture (MoCap) data. Given a candidate 3D pose our algorithm selects for each joint an image whose 2D pose locally matches the projected 3D pose. The selected images are then combined to generate a new synthetic image by stitching local image patches in a kinematically constrained manner. The resulting images are used to train an end-to-end CNN for full-body 3D pose estimation. We cluster the training data into a large number of pose classes and tackle pose estimation as a K-way classification problem. Such an approach is viable only with large training sets such as ours. Our method outperforms the state of the art in terms of 3D pose estimation in controlled environments (Human3.6M) and shows promising results for in-the-wild images (LSP). This demonstrates that CNNs trained on artificial images generalize well to real images.
3D human pose estimation in monocular images. Recent approaches employ CNNs for 3D pose estimation in monocular images @cite_7 or in videos @cite_10 . Due to the lack of large scale training data, they are usually trained (and tested) on 3D MoCap data in constrained environments @cite_7 . Pose understanding in natural images is usually limited to 2D pose estimation @cite_36 @cite_20 @cite_42 . Recent work also tackles 3D pose understanding from 2D poses @cite_25 @cite_38 . Some approaches use as input the 2D joints automatically provided by a 2D pose detector @cite_21 @cite_1 , while others jointly solve the 2D and 3D pose estimation @cite_27 @cite_12 . Most similar to ours is the approach of @cite_13 who use a dual-source approach that combines 2D pose estimation with 3D pose retrieval. Our method uses the same two training sources, i.e., images with annotated 2D pose and 3D MoCap data. However, we combine both sources off-line to generate a large training set that is used to train an end-to-end CNN 3D pose classifier. This is shown to improve over @cite_13 , which can be explained by the fact that training is performed in an end-to-end fashion.
@cite_13 @cite_38 @cite_7 @cite_36 @cite_42 @cite_21 @cite_1 @cite_27 @cite_12 @cite_10 @cite_25 @cite_20
2963013806 2178077220 2949812103 2155394491 2113325037 2088196373 2039262381 2111446867 2285449971 1943191679 2952422028
One major challenge for 3D pose estimation from a single RGB image is the acquisition of sufficient training data. In particular, collecting large amounts of training data that contain unconstrained images and are annotated with accurate 3D poses is infeasible. We therefore propose to use two independent training sources. The first source consists of images with annotated 2D poses and the second source consists of accurate 3D motion capture data. To integrate both sources, we propose a dual-source approach that combines 2D pose estimation with efficient and robust 3D pose retrieval. In our experiments, we show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results and is even competitive when the skeleton structure of the two sources differ substantially. Reconstructing 3D human poses from a single 2D image is an ill-posed problem without considering the human body model. Explicitly enforcing physiological constraints is known to be non-convex and usually leads to difficulty in finding an optimal solution. An attractive alternative is to learn a prior model of the human body from a set of human pose data. In this paper, we develop a new approach, namely pose locality constrained representation (PLCR), to model the 3D human body and use it to improve 3D human pose reconstruction. In this approach, the human pose space is first hierarchically divided into lower-dimensional pose subspaces by subspace clustering. After that, a block-structural pose dictionary is constructed by concatenating the basis poses from all the pose subspaces. Finally, PLCR utilizes the block-structural pose dictionary to explicitly encourage pose locality in human-body modeling – nonzero coefficients are only assigned to the basis poses from a small number of pose subspaces that are close to each other in the pose-subspace hierarchy. We combine PLCR into the matching-pursuit based 3D human-pose reconstruction algorithm and show that the proposed PLCR-based algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithm that uses the standard sparse representation and physiological regularity in reconstructing a variety of human poses from both synthetic data and real images. This paper focuses on structured-output learning using deep neural networks for 3D human pose estimation from monocular images. Our network takes an image and 3D pose as inputs and outputs a score value, which is high when the image-pose pair matches and low otherwise. The network structure consists of a convolutional neural network for image feature extraction, followed by two sub-networks for transforming the image features and pose into a joint embedding. The score function is then the dot-product between the image and pose embeddings. The image-pose embedding and score function are jointly trained using a maximum-margin cost function. Our proposed framework can be interpreted as a special form of structured support vector machines where the joint feature space is discriminatively learned using deep neural networks. We test our framework on the Human3.6m dataset and obtain state-of-the-art results compared to other recent methods. Finally, we present visualizations of the image-pose embedding space, demonstrating the network has learned a high-level embedding of body-orientation and pose-configuration. We present a method for estimating articulated human pose from a single static image based on a graphical model with novel pairwise relations that make adaptive use of local image measurements. More precisely, we specify a graphical model for human pose which exploits the fact the local image measurements can be used both to detect parts (or joints) and also to predict the spatial relationships between them (Image Dependent Pairwise Relations). These spatial relationships are represented by a mixture model. We use Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) to learn conditional probabilities for the presence of parts and their spatial relationships within image patches. Hence our model combines the representational flexibility of graphical models with the efficiency and statistical power of DCNNs. Our method significantly outperforms the state of the art methods on the LSP and FLIC datasets and also performs very well on the Buffy dataset without any training. We propose a method for human pose estimation based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). The pose estimation is formulated as a DNN-based regression problem towards body joints. We present a cascade of such DNN regres- sors which results in high precision pose estimates. The approach has the advantage of reasoning about pose in a holistic fashion and has a simple but yet powerful formula- tion which capitalizes on recent advances in Deep Learn- ing. We present a detailed empirical analysis with state-of- art or better performance on four academic benchmarks of diverse real-world images. Markerless 3D human pose detection from a single image is a severely underconstrained problem because different 3D poses can have similar image projections. In order to handle this ambiguity, current approaches rely on prior shape models that can only be correctly adjusted if 2D image features are accurately detected. Unfortunately, although current 2D part detector algorithms have shown promising results, they are not yet accurate enough to guarantee a complete disambiguation of the 3D inferred shape. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for estimating 3D human pose even when observations are noisy. We propose a stochastic sampling strategy to propagate the noise from the image plane to the shape space. This provides a set of ambiguous 3D shapes, which are virtually undistinguishable from their image projections. Disambiguation is then achieved by imposing kinematic constraints that guarantee the resulting pose resembles a 3D human shape. We validate the method on a variety of situations in which state-of-the-art 2D detectors yield either inaccurate estimations or partly miss some of the body parts. Human pose estimation is a key step to action recognition. We propose a method of estimating 3D human poses from a single image, which works in conjunction with an existing 2D pose joint detector. 3D pose estimation is challenging because multiple 3D poses may correspond to the same 2D pose after projection due to the lack of depth information. Moreover, current 2D pose estimators are usually inaccurate which may cause errors in the 3D estimation. We address the challenges in three ways: (i) We represent a 3D pose as a linear combination of a sparse set of bases learned from 3D human skeletons. (ii) We enforce limb length constraints to eliminate anthropomorphically implausible skeletons. (iii) We estimate a 3D pose by minimizing the 1-norm error between the projection of the 3D pose and the corresponding 2D detection. The 1-norm loss term is robust to inaccurate 2D joint estimations. We use the alternating direction method (ADM) to solve the optimization problem efficiently. Our approach outperforms the state-of-the-arts on three benchmark datasets. We introduce a novel approach to automatically recover 3D human pose from a single image. Most previous work follows a pipelined approach: initially, a set of 2D features such as edges, joints or silhouettes are detected in the image, and then these observations are used to infer the 3D pose. Solving these two problems separately may lead to erroneous 3D poses when the feature detector has performed poorly. In this paper, we address this issue by jointly solving both the 2D detection and the 3D inference problems. For this purpose, we propose a Bayesian framework that integrates a generative model based on latent variables and discriminative 2D part detectors based on HOGs, and perform inference using evolutionary algorithms. Real experimentation demonstrates competitive results, and the ability of our methodology to provide accurate 2D and 3D pose estimations even when the 2D detectors are inaccurate. This paper addresses the challenge of 3D full-body human pose estimation from a monocular image sequence. Here, two cases are considered: (i) the image locations of the human joints are provided and (ii) the image locations of joints are unknown. In the former case, a novel approach is introduced that integrates a sparsity-driven 3D geometric prior and temporal smoothness. In the latter case, the former case is extended by treating the image locations of the joints as latent variables. A deep fully convolutional network is trained to predict the uncertainty maps of the 2D joint locations. The 3D pose estimates are realized via an Expectation-Maximization algorithm over the entire sequence, where it is shown that the 2D joint location uncertainties can be conveniently marginalized out during inference. Empirical evaluation on the Human3.6M dataset shows that the proposed approaches achieve greater 3D pose estimation accuracy over state-of-the-art baselines. Further, the proposed approach outperforms a publicly available 2D pose estimation baseline on the challenging PennAction dataset. Estimating 3D human pose from 2D joint locations is central to the analysis of people in images and video. To address the fact that the problem is inherently ill posed, many methods impose a prior over human poses. Unfortunately these priors admit invalid poses because they do not model how joint-limits vary with pose. Here we make two key contributions. First, we collect a motion capture dataset that explores a wide range of human poses. From this we learn a pose-dependent model of joint limits that forms our prior. Both dataset and prior are available for research purposes. Second, we define a general parametrization of body pose and a new, multi-stage, method to estimate 3D pose from 2D joint locations using an over-complete dictionary of poses. Our method shows good generalization while avoiding impossible poses. We quantitatively compare our method with recent work and show state-of-the-art results on 2D to 3D pose estimation using the CMU mocap dataset. We also show superior results using manual annotations on real images and automatic detections on the Leeds sports pose dataset. This paper proposes a new hybrid architecture that consists of a deep Convolutional Network and a Markov Random Field. We show how this architecture is successfully applied to the challenging problem of articulated human pose estimation in monocular images. The architecture can exploit structural domain constraints such as geometric relationships between body joint locations. We show that joint training of these two model paradigms improves performance and allows us to significantly outperform existing state-of-the-art techniques.