In this work, we introduce the challenging problem of joint multi-person pose estimation and tracking of an unknown number of persons in unconstrained videos. Existing methods for multi-person pose estimation in images cannot be applied directly to this problem, since it also requires to solve the problem of person association over time in addition to the pose estimation for each person. We therefore propose a novel method that jointly models multi-person pose estimation and tracking in a single formulation. To this end, we represent body joint detections in a video by a spatio-temporal graph and solve an integer linear program to partition the graph into sub-graphs that correspond to plausible body pose trajectories for each person. The proposed approach implicitly handles occlusion and truncation of persons. Since the problem has not been addressed quantitatively in the literature, we introduce a challenging "Multi-Person PoseTrack" dataset, and also propose a completely unconstrained evaluation protocol that does not make any assumptions about the scale, size, location or the number of persons. Finally, we evaluate the proposed approach and several baseline methods on our new dataset.
This paper presents a novel approach for analyzing human actions in non-scripted, unconstrained video settings based on volumetric, x-y-t, patch classifiers, termed actemes. Unlike previous action-related work, the discovery of patch classifiers is posed as a strongly-supervised process. Specifically, key point labels (e.g., position) across space time are used in a data-driven training process to discover patches that are highly clustered in the space time key point configuration space. To support this process, a new human action dataset consisting of challenging consumer videos is introduced, where notably the action label, the 2D position of a set of key points and their visibilities are provided for each video frame. On a novel input video, each acteme is used in a sliding volume scheme to yield a set of sparse, non-overlapping detections. These detections provide the intermediate substrate for segmenting out the action. For action classification, the proposed representation shows significant improvement over state-of-the-art low-level features, while providing spatiotemporal localization as additional output, which sheds further light into detailed action understanding. Although action recognition in videos is widely studied, current methods often fail on real-world datasets. Many recent approaches improve accuracy and robustness to cope with challenging video sequences, but it is often unclear what affects the results most. This paper attempts to provide insights based on a systematic performance evaluation using thoroughly-annotated data of human actions. We annotate human Joints for the HMDB dataset (J-HMDB). This annotation can be used to derive ground truth optical flow and segmentation. We evaluate current methods using this dataset and systematically replace the output of various algorithms with ground truth. This enables us to discover what is important - for example, should we work on improving flow algorithms, estimating human bounding boxes, or enabling pose estimation? In summary, we find that high-level pose features greatly outperform low mid level features, in particular, pose over time is critical, but current pose estimation algorithms are not yet reliable enough to provide this information. We also find that the accuracy of a top-performing action recognition framework can be greatly increased by refining the underlying low mid level features, this suggests it is important to improve optical flow and human detection algorithms. Our analysis and J-HMDB dataset should facilitate a deeper understanding of action recognition algorithms.