Deep probabilistic human pose estimation
The authors consider the problem of human pose estimation using probabilistic convolutional neural networks. They explore ways to improve human pose estimation accuracy on standard pose estimation benchmarks MPII human pose and Leeds Sports Pose (LSP) datasets using frameworks for probabilistic deep learning. Such frameworks transform deterministic neural network into a probabilistic one and allow sampling of independent and equiprobable hypotheses (different outputs) for a given input. Overlapping body parts and body joints hidden under clothes or other obstacles make the problem of human pose estimation ambiguous. In this context to get accurate estimation of joints' position they use uncertainty in network's predictions, which is represented by variance of hypotheses, provided by a probabilistic convolutional neural network, and confidence is characterised by mean of them. Their work is based on current CNN cascades for pose estimation. They propose and evaluate three probabilistic convolutional neural networks built on top of deterministic ones with two probabilistic deep learning frameworks - DISCO networks and Bayesian SegNet. The authors evaluate their models on standard pose estimation benchmarks and show that proposed probabilistic models outperform base deterministic ones.