text: State-of-the-art 3D human pose estimation approaches typically estimate pose from the entire RGB image in a single forward run. In this paper, we develop a post-processing step to refine 3D human pose estimation from body part patches. Using local patches as input has two advantages. First, the fine details around body parts are zoomed in to high resolution for preciser 3D pose prediction. Second, it enables the part appearance to be shared between poses to benefit rare poses. In order to acquire informative representation of patches, we explore different input modalities and validate the superiority of fusing predicted segmentation with RGB. We show that our method consistently boosts the accuracy of state-of-the-art 3D human pose methods.
  @cite_14: We propose a new learning-based method for estimating 2D human pose from a single image, using Dual-Source Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DS-CNN). Recently, many methods have been developed to estimate human pose by using pose priors that are estimated from physiologically inspired graphical models or learned from a holistic perspective. In this paper, we propose to integrate both the local (body) part appearance and the holistic view of each local part for more accurate human pose estimation. Specifically, the proposed DS-CNN takes a set of image patches (category-independent object proposals for training and multi-scale sliding windows for testing) as the input and then learns the appearance of each local part by considering their holistic views in the full body. Using DS-CNN, we achieve both joint detection, which determines whether an image patch contains a body joint, and joint localization, which finds the exact location of the joint in the image patch. Finally, we develop an algorithm to combine these joint detection localization results from all the image patches for estimating the human pose. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing to the state-of-the-art human-pose estimation methods based on pose priors that are estimated from physiologically inspired graphical models or learned from a holistic perspective.
  @cite_26: 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.
  @cite_41: Analyzing joint movements of an athlete helps to improve the pose of the athlete. Human pose estimation (HPE) algorithms regress the locations of parts such as wrists, ankles and knees. In this paper, we propose a network that combines global and local information for HPE using a 2D image. Unlike previous works that have used global or local information separately, we use the combined information to enhance the performance of HPE. General information from a global network is used as an input to a local network to refine the location of a part using a variety of regions. The global network is based on ResNet-101 [6] and trained to regress a heatmap representing parts’ locations. The output features from the global network are used as input features for the local network. The local network learns spatial information using position sensitive score maps [11]. Through the end-to-end learning, the global network is affected by the local information. We demonstrate that the proposed HPE method is efficient on the LSP and UCF sports datasets.
  @cite_6: Abstract Hand pose estimation from single depth images is an essential topic in computer vision and human computer interaction. Despite recent advancements in this area promoted by convolutional neural networks, accurate hand pose estimation is still a challenging problem. In this paper we propose a novel approach named as pose guided structured region ensemble network (Pose-REN) to boost the performance of hand pose estimation. Under the guidance of an initially estimated pose, the proposed method extracts regions from the feature maps of convolutional neural network and generates more optimal and representative features for hand pose estimation. The extracted feature regions are then integrated hierarchically according to the topology of hand joints by tree-structured fully connections to regress the refined hand pose. The final hand pose is obtained by an iterative cascaded method. Comprehensive experiments on public hand pose datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms.
  @cite_44: In this paper, we address the problem of estimating the positions of human joints, i.e., articulated pose estimation. Recent state-of-the-art solutions model two key issues, joint detection and spatial configuration refinement, together using convolutional neural networks. Our work mainly focuses on spatial configuration refinement by reducing variations of human poses statistically, which is motivated by the observation that the scattered distribution of the relative locations of joints (e.g., the left wrist is distributed nearly uniformly in a circular area around the left shoulder) makes the learning of convolutional spatial models hard. We present a two-stage normalization scheme, human body normalization and limb normalization, to make the distribution of the relative joint locations compact, resulting in easier learning of convolutional spatial models and more accurate pose estimation. In addition, our empirical results show that incorporating multi-scale supervision and multi-scale fusion into the joint detection network is beneficial. Experiment results demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the benchmarks.
  @cite_43: Predicting human pose in the wild is a challenging problem due to high flexibility of joints and possible occlusion. Existing approaches generally tackle the difficulties either by holistic prediction or multi-stage processing, which suffer from poor performance for locating challenging joints or high computational cost. In this paper, we propose a new hierarchical contextual refinement network (HCRN) to robustly predict human poses in an efficient manner, where human body joints of different complexities are processed at different layers in a context hierarchy. Different from existing approaches, our proposed model predicts positions of joints from easy to difficult in a single stage through effectively exploiting informative contexts provided in the previous layer. Such approach offers two appealing advantages over state-of-the-arts: 1) more accurate than predicting all the joints together and 2) more efficient than multi-stage processing methods. We design a contextual refinement unit (CRU) to implement the proposed model, which enables auto-diffusion of joint detection results to effectively transfer informative context from easy joints to difficult ones. In this way, difficult joints can be reliably detected even in presence of occlusion or severe distracting factors. Multiple CRUs are organized into a tree-structured hierarchy which is end-to-end trainable and does not require processing joints for multiple iterations. Comprehensive experiments evaluate the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed HCRN model to improve well-established baselines and achieve the new state-of-the-art on multiple human pose estimation benchmarks.
  @cite_27: 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.
  @cite_45: We propose a novel approach to 3D human pose estimation from a single depth map. Recently, convolutional neural network (CNN) has become a powerful paradigm in computer vision. Many of computer vision tasks have benefited from CNNs, however, the conventional approach to directly regress 3D body joint locations from an image does not yield a noticeably improved performance. In contrast, we formulate the problem as estimating per-voxel likelihood of key body joints from a 3D occupancy grid. We argue that learning a mapping from volumetric input to volumetric output with 3D convolution consistently improves the accuracy when compared to learning a regression from depth map to 3D joint coordinates. We propose a two-stage approach to reduce the computational overhead caused by volumetric representation and 3D convolution: Holistic 2D prediction and Local 3D prediction. In the first stage, Planimetric Network (P-Net) estimates per-pixel likelihood for each body joint in the holistic 2D space. In the second stage, Volumetric Network (V-Net) estimates the per-voxel likelihood of each body joints in the local 3D space around the 2D estimations of the first stage, effectively reducing the computational cost. Our model outperforms existing methods by a large margin in publicly available datasets.
  @cite_23: Recent state-of-the-art performance on human-body pose estimation has been achieved with Deep Convolutional Networks (ConvNets). Traditional ConvNet architectures include pooling and sub-sampling layers which reduce computational requirements, introduce invariance and prevent over-training. These benefits of pooling come at the cost of reduced localization accuracy. We introduce a novel architecture which includes an efficient ‘position refinement’ model that is trained to estimate the joint offset location within a small region of the image. This refinement model is jointly trained in cascade with a state-of-the-art ConvNet model [21] to achieve improved accuracy in human joint location estimation. We show that the variance of our detector approaches the variance of human annotations on the FLIC [20] dataset and outperforms all existing approaches on the MPII-human-pose dataset [1].
  @cite_31: We propose a data-driven method for recovering missing parts of 3D shapes. Our method is based on a new deep learning architecture consisting of two sub-networks: a global structure inference network and a local geometry refinement network. The global structure inference network incorporates a long short-term memorized context fusion module (LSTM-CF) that infers the global structure of the shape based on multi-view depth information provided as part of the input. It also includes a 3D fully convolutional (3DFCN) module that further enriches the global structure representation according to volumetric information in the input. Under the guidance of the global structure network, the local geometry refinement network takes as input local 3D patches around missing regions, and progressively produces a high-resolution, complete surface through a volumetric encoder-decoder architecture. Our method jointly trains the global structure inference and local geometry refinement networks in an end-to-end manner. We perform qualitative and quantitative evaluations on six object categories, demonstrating that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art work on shape completion.
  @cite_20: We introduce and evaluate several architectures for Convolutional Neural Networks to predict the 3D joint locations of a hand given a depth map. We first show that a prior on the 3D pose can be easily introduced and significantly improves the accuracy and reliability of the predictions. We also show how to use context efficiently to deal with ambiguities between fingers. These two contributions allow us to significantly outperform the state-of-the-art on several challenging benchmarks, both in terms of accuracy and computation times.
summary: Combining local part appearance with holistic image has been proven beneficial in 2D pose @cite_43 @cite_44 @cite_14 @cite_41 @cite_26 . @cite_27 capture spatial relationship within image patches of different parts with DCNN and graphical model. @cite_23 crop features around coarse 2D keypoint prediction to regress 2D offset. In the scenario of 3D pose, however, few works have explicitly processed the information of local part. @cite_6 extract local regional feature map. @cite_45 @cite_31 @cite_20 perform local 3D refinement from local view in depth image. Different from these works that only utilize depth image as input, we capitalize on local RGB and segmentation cues.