text: With the advent of deep learning, object detection drifted from a bottom-up to a top-down recognition problem. State of the art algorithms enumerate a near-exhaustive list of object locations and classify each into: object or not. In this paper, we show that bottom-up approaches still perform competitively. We detect four extreme points (top-most, left-most, bottom-most, right-most) and one center point of objects using a standard keypoint estimation network. We group the five keypoints into a bounding box if they are geometrically aligned. Object detection is then a purely appearance-based keypoint estimation problem, without region classification or implicit feature learning. The proposed method performs on-par with the state-of-the-art region based detection methods, with a bounding box AP of 43.2 on COCO test-dev. In addition, our estimated extreme points directly span a coarse octagonal mask, with a COCO Mask AP of 18.9 , much better than the Mask AP of vanilla bounding boxes. Extreme point guided segmentation further improves this to 34.6 Mask AP.
  @cite_30: We present an approach to efficiently detect the 2D pose of multiple people in an image. The approach uses a nonparametric representation, which we refer to as Part Affinity Fields (PAFs), to learn to associate body parts with individuals in the image. The architecture encodes global context, allowing a greedy bottom-up parsing step that maintains high accuracy while achieving realtime performance, irrespective of the number of people in the image. The architecture is designed to jointly learn part locations and their association via two branches of the same sequential prediction process. Our method placed first in the inaugural COCO 2016 keypoints challenge, and significantly exceeds the previous state-of-the-art result on the MPII Multi-Person benchmark, both in performance and efficiency.
  @cite_1: We introduce associative embedding, a novel method for supervising convolutional neural networks for the task of detection and grouping. A number of computer vision problems can be framed in this manner including multi-person pose estimation, instance segmentation, and multi-object tracking. Usually the grouping of detections is achieved with multi-stage pipelines, instead we propose an approach that teaches a network to simultaneously output detections and group assignments. This technique can be easily integrated into any state-of-the-art network architecture that produces pixel-wise predictions. We show how to apply this method to multi-person pose estimation and report state-of-the-art performance on the MPII and MS-COCO datasets.
  @cite_50: This paper proposes a novel Pose Partition Network (PPN) to address the challenging multi-person pose estimation problem. The proposed PPN is favorably featured by low complexity and high accuracy of joint detection and partition. In particular, PPN performs dense regressions from global joint candidates within a specific embedding space, which is parameterized by centroids of persons, to efficiently generate robust person detection and joint partition. Then, PPN infers body joint configurations through conducting graph partition for each person detection locally, utilizing reliable global affinity cues. In this way, PPN reduces computation complexity and improves multi-person pose estimation significantly. We implement PPN with the Hourglass architecture as the backbone network to simultaneously learn joint detector and dense regressor. Extensive experiments on benchmarks MPII Human Pose Multi-Person, extended PASCAL-Person-Part, and WAF show the efficiency of PPN with new state-of-the-art performance.
  @cite_2: We present a box-free bottom-up approach for the tasks of pose estimation and instance segmentation of people in multi-person images using an efficient single-shot model. The proposed PersonLab model tackles both semantic-level reasoning and object-part associations using part-based modeling. Our model employs a convolutional network which learns to detect individual keypoints and predict their relative displacements, allowing us to group keypoints into person pose instances. Further, we propose a part-induced geometric embedding descriptor which allows us to associate semantic person pixels with their corresponding person instance, delivering instance-level person segmentations. Our system is based on a fully-convolutional architecture and allows for efficient inference, with runtime essentially independent of the number of people present in the scene. Trained on COCO data alone, our system achieves COCO test-dev keypoint average precision of 0.665 using single-scale inference and 0.687 using multi-scale inference, significantly outperforming all previous bottom-up pose estimation systems. We are also the first bottom-up method to report competitive results for the person class in the COCO instance segmentation task, achieving a person category average precision of 0.417.
summary: Determining which keypoints are from the same person is an important component in bottom-up multi-person pose estimation. There are multiple solutions: Newell al @cite_1 proposes to learn an associative feature for each keypoint, which is trained using an embedding loss. Cao al @cite_30 learns an affinity field which resembles the edge between connected keypoints. Papandreous al @cite_2 learns the displacement to the parent joint on the human skeleton tree, as a 2-d feature for each keypoint. Nie al @cite_50 also learn a feature as the offset with respect to the object center.