Human pose estimation (i.e., locating the body parts joints of a person) is a fundamental problem in human-computer interaction and multimedia applications. Significant progress has been made based on the development of depth sensors, i.e., accessible human pose prediction from still depth images [32]. However, most of the existing approaches to this problem involve several components models that are independently designed and optimized, leading to suboptimal performances. In this paper, we propose a novel inference-embedded multi-task learning framework for predicting human pose from still depth images, which is implemented with a deep architecture of neural networks. Specifically, we handle two cascaded tasks: i) generating the heat (confidence) maps of body parts via a fully convolutional network (FCN); ii) seeking the optimal configuration of body parts based on the detected body part proposals via an inference built-in MatchNet [10], which measures the appearance and geometric kinematic compatibility of body parts and embodies the dynamic programming inference as an extra network layer. These two tasks are jointly optimized. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed deep model significantly improves the accuracy of human pose estimation over other several state-of-the-art methods or SDKs. We also release a large-scale dataset for comparison, which includes 100K depth images under challenging scenarios.
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. 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. In this work, we address the human parsing task with a novel Contextualized Convolutional Neural Network (Co-CNN) architecture, which well integrates the cross-layer context, global image-level context, within-super-pixel context and cross-super-pixel neighborhood context into a unified network. Given an input human image, Co-CNN produces the pixel-wise categorization in an end-to-end way. First, the cross-layer context is captured by our basic local-to-global-to-local structure, which hierarchically combines the global semantic structure and the local fine details within the cross-layers. Second, the global image-level label prediction is used as an auxiliary objective in the intermediate layer of the Co-CNN, and its outputs are further used for guiding the feature learning in subsequent convolutional layers to leverage the global image-level context. Finally, to further utilize the local super-pixel contexts, the within-super-pixel smoothing and cross-super-pixel neighbourhood voting are formulated as natural sub-components of the Co-CNN to achieve the local label consistency in both training and testing process. Comprehensive evaluations on two public datasets well demonstrate the significant superiority of our Co-CNN architecture over other state-of-the-arts for human parsing. In particular, the F-1 score on the large dataset [15] reaches 76.95 by Co-CNN, significantly higher than 62.81 and 64.38 by the state-of-the-art algorithms, M-CNN [21] and ATR [15], respectively. 