In this paper, we propose a novel multi-stage network architecture with two branches in each stage to estimate multi-person poses in images. The first branch predicts the confidence maps of joints and uses a geometrical transform kernel to propagate information between neighboring joints at the confidence level. The second branch proposes a bi-directional graph structure information model (BGSIM) to encode rich contextual information and to infer the occlusion relationship among different joints. We dynamically determine the joint point with highest response of the confidence maps as base point of passing message in BGSIM. Based on the proposed network structure, we achieve an average precision of 62.9 on the COCO Keypoint Challenge dataset and 77.6 on the MPII (multi-person) dataset. Compared with other state-of-art methods, our method can achieve highly promising results on our selected multi-person dataset without extra training.
Early studies on human pose estimation mainly focused on single-person pose estimation due to its simplicity. introduced CNN to solve the pose estimation problem in DeepPose @cite_23 , which cascaded CNN pose regressors to deal with the body joints. @cite_5 and @cite_21 found that deep CNNs performed effectively in human pose estimation as well as proposed a multi-stage architecture to solve the pose estimation problem. compiled several hourglass modules and proposed a U-shape architecture for human pose prediction. X. @cite_38 designed a structured feature-learning architecture to infer the correlations among different body parts at the feature level for human pose estimation. Although CNN can effectively extract feature information, the occlusion relationship among different body parts have not been fully explored.
@cite_5 @cite_21 @cite_23 @cite_38
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Pose Machines provide a sequential prediction framework for learning rich implicit spatial models. In this work we show a systematic design for how convolutional networks can be incorporated into the pose machine framework for learning image features and image-dependent spatial models for the task of pose estimation. The contribution of this paper is to implicitly model long-range dependencies between variables in structured prediction tasks such as articulated pose estimation. We achieve this by designing a sequential architecture composed of convolutional networks that directly operate on belief maps from previous stages, producing increasingly refined estimates for part locations, without the need for explicit graphical model-style inference. Our approach addresses the characteristic difficulty of vanishing gradients during training by providing a natural learning objective function that enforces intermediate supervision, thereby replenishing back-propagated gradients and conditioning the learning procedure. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and outperform competing methods on standard benchmarks including the MPII, LSP, and FLIC datasets. This work introduces a novel convolutional network architecture for the task of human pose estimation. Features are processed across all scales and consolidated to best capture the various spatial relationships associated with the body. We show how repeated bottom-up, top-down processing used in conjunction with intermediate supervision is critical to improving the performance of the network. We refer to the architecture as a "stacked hourglass" network based on the successive steps of pooling and upsampling that are done to produce a final set of predictions. State-of-the-art results are achieved on the FLIC and MPII benchmarks outcompeting all recent methods. 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. In this paper, we propose a structured feature learning framework to reason the correlations among body joints at the feature level in human pose estimation. Different from existing approaches of modeling structures on score maps or predicted labels, feature maps preserve substantially richer descriptions of body joints. The relationships between feature maps of joints are captured with the introduced geometrical transform kernels, which can be easily implemented with a convolution layer. Features and their relationships are jointly learned in an end-to-end learning system. A bi-directional tree structured model is proposed, so that the feature channels at a body joint can well receive information from other joints. The proposed framework improves feature learning substantially. With very simple post processing, it reaches the best mean PCP on the LSP and FLIC datasets. Compared with the baseline of learning features at each joint separately with ConvNet, the mean PCP has been improved by 18 on FLIC. The code is released to the public. 1