We propose a joint model of human joint detection and association for 2D multi-person pose estimation (MPPE). The approach unifies training of joint detection and association without a need for further processing or sophisticated heuristics in order to associate the joints with people individually. The approach consists of two stages, where in the first stage joint detection heatmaps and association features are extracted, and in the second stage, whose input are the extracted features of the first stage, we introduce a recurrent neural network (RNN) which predicts the heatmaps of a single person's joints in each iteration. In addition, the network learns a stopping criterion in order to halt once it has identified all individuals in the image. This approach allowed us to eliminate several heuristic assumptions and parameters needed for association which do not necessarily hold true. Additionally, such an end-to-end approach allows the final objective to be known and directly optimized over during training. We evaluated our model on the challenging MSCOCO dataset and obtained an improvement over the baseline, particularly in challenging scenes with occlusions.
We present a recurrent model for semantic instance segmentation that sequentially generates binary masks and their associated class probabilities for every object in an image. Our proposed system is trainable end-to-end from an input image to a sequence of labeled masks and, compared to methods relying on object proposals, does not require post-processing steps on its output. We study the suitability of our recurrent model on three different instance segmentation benchmarks, namely Pascal VOC 2012, CVPPP Plant Leaf Segmentation and Cityscapes. Further, we analyze the object sorting patterns generated by our model and observe that it learns to follow a consistent pattern, which correlates with the activations learned in the encoder part of our network. Source code and models are available at this https URL Instance segmentation is the problem of detecting and delineating each distinct object of interest appearing in an image. Current instance segmentation approaches consist of ensembles of modules that are trained independently of each other, thus missing opportunities for joint learning. Here we propose a new instance segmentation paradigm consisting in an end-to-end method that learns how to segment instances sequentially. The model is based on a recurrent neural network that sequentially finds objects and their segmentations one at a time. This net is provided with a spatial memory that keeps track of what pixels have been explained and allows occlusion handling. In order to train the model we designed a principled loss function that accurately represents the properties of the instance segmentation problem. In the experiments carried out, we found that our method outperforms recent approaches on multiple person segmentation, and all state of the art approaches on the Plant Phenotyping dataset for leaf counting.