There has been significant progress on pose estimation and increasing interests on pose tracking in recent years. At the same time, the overall algorithm and system complexity increases as well, making the algorithm analysis and comparison more difficult. This work provides simple and effective baseline methods. They are helpful for inspiring and evaluating new ideas for the field. State-of-the-art results are achieved on challenging benchmarks. The code will be available at https://github.com/leoxiaobin/pose.pytorch.
In this paper, we present a data-driven approach for human pose tracking in video data. We formulate the human pose tracking problem as a discrete optimization problem based on spatio-temporal pictorial structure model and solve this problem in a greedy framework very efficiently. We propose the model to track the human pose by combining the human pose estimation from single image and traditional object tracking in a video. Our pose tracking objective function consists of the following terms: likeliness of appearance of a part within a frame, temporal displacement of the part from previous fra…
Both the tasks of multi-person human pose estimation and pose tracking in videos are quite challenging. Existing methods can be categorized into two groups: top-down and bottom-up approaches. In this paper, following the top-down approach, we aim to build a strong baseline system with three modules: human candidate detector, single-person pose estimator and human pose tracker. Firstly, we choose a generic object detector among state-of-the-art methods to detect human candidates. Then, the cascaded pyramid network is used to estimate the corresponding human pose. Finally, we use a flow-based po…
Video annotation is expensive and time consuming. Consequently, datasets for multi-person pose estimation and tracking are less diverse and have more sparse annotations compared to large scale image datasets for human pose estimation. This makes it challenging to learn deep learning based models for associating keypoints across frames that are robust to nuisance factors such as motion blur and occlusions for the task of multi-person pose tracking. To address this issue, we propose an approach that relies on keypoint correspondences for associating persons in videos. Instead of training the net…
We propose a novel top-down approach that tackles the problem of multi-person human pose estimation and tracking in videos. In contrast to existing top-down approaches, our method is not limited by the performance of its person detector and can predict the poses of person instances not localized. It achieves this capability by propagating known person locations forward and backward in time and searching for poses in those regions. Our approach consists of three components: (i) a Clip Tracking Network that performs body joint detection and tracking simultaneously on small video clips; (ii) a Vi…
Multi-person human pose estimation and tracking in the wild is important and challenging. For training a powerful model, large-scale training data are crucial. While there are several datasets for human pose estimation, the best practice for training on multi-dataset has not been investigated. In this paper, we present a simple network called Multi-Domain Pose Network (MDPN) to address this problem. By treating the task as multi-domain learning, our methods can learn a better representation for pose prediction. Together with prediction heads fine-tuning and multi-branch combination, it shows s…
We present BlazePose, a lightweight convolutional neural network architecture for human pose estimation that is tailored for real-time inference on mobile devices. During inference, the network produces 33 body keypoints for a single person and runs at over 30 frames per second on a Pixel 2 phone. This makes it particularly suited to real-time use cases like fitness tracking and sign language recognition. Our main contributions include a novel body pose tracking solution and a lightweight body pose estimation neural network that uses both heatmaps and regression to keypoint coordinates.
Stevens Institute of Technology（史蒂文斯理工学院）；Wormpex AI Research（Wormpex AI研究院）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Multi-person pose estimation and tracking serve as crucial steps for video understanding. Most state-of-the-art approaches rely on first estimating poses in each frame and only then implementing data association and refinement. Despite the promising results achieved, such a strategy is inevitably prone to missed detections especially in heavily-cluttered scenes, since this tracking-by-detection paradigm is, by nature, largely dependent on visual evidences that are absent in the case of occlusion. In this paper, we propose a novel online approach to learning the pose dynamics, which are indepen…
MPI for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；University of Bonn（波恩大学）；Amazon Research（亚马逊研究院）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Human poses and motions are important cues for analysis of videos with people and there is strong evidence that representations based on body pose are highly effective for a variety of tasks such as activity recognition, content retrieval and social signal processing. In this work, we aim to further advance the state of the art by establishing "PoseTrack", a new large-scale benchmark for video-based human pose estimation and articulated tracking, and bringing together the community of researchers working on visual human analysis. The benchmark encompasses three competition tracks focusing on i…
Beijing Laboratory of Advanced Information Networks（北京先进信息网络实验室）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Horizon Robotics（地平线机器人）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）
Human pose estimation has witnessed a significant advance thanks to the development of deep learning. Recent human pose estimation approaches tend to directly predict the location heatmaps, which causes quantization errors and inevitably deteriorates the performance within the reduced network output. Aim at solving it, we revisit the heatmap-offset aggregation method and propose the Offset-guided Network (OGN) with an intuitive but effective fusion strategy for both two-stages pose estimation and Mask R-CNN. For two-stages pose estimation, a greedy box generation strategy is also proposed to k…
Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
We present VoxelTrack for multi-person 3D pose estimation and tracking from a few cameras which are separated by wide baselines. It employs a multi-branch network to jointly estimate 3D poses and re-identification (Re-ID) features for all people in the environment. In contrast to previous efforts which require to establish cross-view correspondence based on noisy 2D pose estimates, it directly estimates and tracks 3D poses from a 3D voxel-based representation constructed from multi-view images. We first discretize the 3D space by regular voxels and compute a feature vector for each voxel by av…
National Taiwan University（台湾大学）；Academia Sinica Taiwan（台湾中央研究院）
This paper introduces an approach for multi-human 3D pose estimation and tracking based on calibrated multi-view. The main challenge lies in finding the cross-view and temporal correspondences correctly even when several human pose estimations are noisy. Compare to previous solutions that construct 3D poses from multiple views, our approach takes advantage of temporal consistency to match the 2D poses estimated with previously constructed 3D skeletons in every view. Therefore cross-view and temporal associations are accomplished simultaneously. Since the performance suffers from mistaken assoc…
6D object pose tracking has been extensively studied in the robotics and computer vision communities. The most promising solutions, leveraging on deep neural networks and/or filtering and optimization, exhibit notable performance on standard benchmarks. However, to our best knowledge, these have not been tested thoroughly against fast object motions. Tracking performance in this scenario degrades significantly, especially for methods that do not achieve real-time performance and introduce non negligible delays. In this work, we introduce ROFT, a Kalman filtering approach for 6D object pose and…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）
A key capability of a long-term tracker is to search for targets in very large areas (typically the entire image) to handle possible target absences or tracking failures. However, currently there is a lack of such a strong baseline for global instance search. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap. Specifically, we propose GlobalTrack, a pure global instance search based tracker that makes no assumption on the temporal consistency of the target's positions and scales. GlobalTrack is developed based on two-stage object detectors, and it is able to perform full-image and multi-scale search of a…
Florida State University（佛罗里达州立大学）；Trinity University（三一大学）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）
WiFi human sensing has become increasingly attractive in enabling emerging human-computer interaction applications. The corresponding technique has gradually evolved from the classification of multiple activity types to more fine-grained tracking of 3D human poses. However, existing WiFi-based 3D human pose tracking is limited to a set of predefined activities. In this work, we present Winect, a 3D human pose tracking system for free-form activity using commodity WiFi devices. Our system tracks free-form activity by estimating a 3D skeleton pose that consists of a set of joints of the human bo…
In this paper, we propose a novel effective light-weight framework, called LightTrack, for online human pose tracking. The proposed framework is designed to be generic for top-down pose tracking and is faster than existing online and offline methods. Single-person Pose Tracking (SPT) and Visual Object Tracking (VOT) are incorporated into one unified functioning entity, easily implemented by a replaceable single-person pose estimation module. Our framework unifies single-person pose tracking with multi-person identity association and sheds first light upon bridging keypoint tracking with object…
Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
We present a method for human pose tracking that is based on learning spatiotemporal relationships among joints. Beyond generating the heatmap of a joint in a given frame, our system also learns to predict the offset of the joint from a neighboring joint in the frame. Additionally, it is trained to predict the displacement of the joint from its position in the previous frame, in a manner that can account for possibly changing joint appearance, unlike optical flow. These relational cues in the spatial domain and temporal domain are inferred in a robust manner by attending only to relevant areas…
Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Object pose detection and tracking has recently attracted increasing attention due to its wide applications in many areas, such as autonomous driving, robotics, and augmented reality. Among methods for object pose detection and tracking, deep learning is the most promising one that has shown better performance than others. However, survey study about the latest development of deep learning-based methods is lacking. Therefore, this study presents a comprehensive review of recent progress in object pose detection and tracking that belongs to the deep learning technical route. To achieve a more t…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Horizon Robotics（地平线机器人）
Both accuracy and efficiency are significant for pose estimation and tracking in videos. State-of-the-art performance is dominated by two-stages top-down methods. Despite the leading results, these methods are impractical for real-world applications due to their separated architectures and complicated calculation. This paper addresses the task of articulated multi-person pose estimation and tracking towards real-time speed. An end-to-end multi-task network (MTN) is designed to perform human detection, pose estimation, and person re-identification (Re-ID) tasks simultaneously. To alleviate the …
Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；JD Explore Academy（京东探索研究院）
Animal pose estimation and tracking (APT) is a fundamental task for detecting and tracking animal keypoints from a sequence of video frames. Previous animal-related datasets focus either on animal tracking or single-frame animal pose estimation, and never on both aspects. The lack of APT datasets hinders the development and evaluation of video-based animal pose estimation and tracking methods, limiting real-world applications, e.g., understanding animal behavior in wildlife conservation. To fill this gap, we make the first step and propose APT-36K, i.e., the first large-scale benchmark for ani…
University of Bonn（波恩大学）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
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 …
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；YITU Technology（依图科技）
This paper presents our solution to ACM MM challenge: Large-scale Human-centric Video Analysis in Complex Events\cite{lin2020human}; specifically, here we focus on Track3: Crowd Pose Tracking in Complex Events. Remarkable progress has been made in multi-pose training in recent years. However, how to track the human pose in crowded and complex environments has not been well addressed. We formulate the problem as several subproblems to be solved. First, we use a multi-object tracking method to assign human ID to each bounding box generated by the detection model. After that, a pose is generated …
Accurate whole-body multi-person pose estimation and tracking is an important yet challenging topic in computer vision. To capture the subtle actions of humans for complex behavior analysis, whole-body pose estimation including the face, body, hand and foot is essential over conventional body-only pose estimation. In this paper, we present AlphaPose, a system that can perform accurate whole-body pose estimation and tracking jointly while running in realtime. To this end, we propose several new techniques: Symmetric Integral Keypoint Regression (SIKR) for fast and fine localization, Parametric …
Peking University（北京大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Shandong University（山东大学）；UCSD（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯AI实验室）；Beijing Institute for General AI（北京通用人工智能研究院）
In this work, we tackle the problem of category-level online pose tracking of objects from point cloud sequences. For the first time, we propose a unified framework that can handle 9DoF pose tracking for novel rigid object instances as well as per-part pose tracking for articulated objects from known categories. Here the 9DoF pose, comprising 6D pose and 3D size, is equivalent to a 3D amodal bounding box representation with free 6D pose. Given the depth point cloud at the current frame and the estimated pose from the last frame, our novel end-to-end pipeline learns to accurately update the pos…
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院沈阳自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
3D hand pose tracking/estimation will be very important in the next generation of human-computer interaction. Most of the currently available algorithms rely on low-cost active depth sensors. However, these sensors can be easily interfered by other active sources and require relatively high power consumption. As a result, they are currently not suitable for outdoor environments and mobile devices. This paper aims at tracking/estimating hand poses using passive stereo which avoids these limitations. A benchmark with 18,000 stereo image pairs and 18,000 depth images captured from different scena…
Robust 6-DoF Object Pose Tracking with Built-In Recovery under Occlusions and Rapid Object Motions
Woven by Toyota, Inc.（丰田编织公司）；University of Bonn（波恩大学）；University of Bonn, Center for Robotics, and the Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence（波恩大学机器人中心以及拉玛尔机器学习与人工智能研究所）
Fraunhofer HHI（弗劳恩霍夫电信研究所）；Humboldt University of Berlin（柏林洪堡大学）
In this paper, we present a multi-object 6D detection and tracking pipeline for potentially similar and non-textured objects. The combination of a convolutional neural network for object classification and rough pose estimation with a local pose refinement and an automatic mismatch detection enables direct application in real-time AR scenarios. A new network architecture, trained solely with synthetic images, allows simultaneous pose estimation of multiple objects with reduced GPU memory consumption and enhanced performance. In addition, the pose estimates are further improved by a local edge-…
We propose a novel approach for joint 3D multi-object tracking and reconstruction from RGB-D sequences in indoor environments. To this end, we detect and reconstruct objects in each frame while predicting dense correspondences mappings into a normalized object space. We leverage those correspondences to inform a graph neural network to solve for the optimal, temporally-consistent 7-DoF pose trajectories of all objects. The novelty of our method is two-fold: first, we propose a new graph-based approach for differentiable pose estimation over time to learn optimal pose trajectories; second, we p…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）
Camera pose tracking attracts much interest both from academic and industrial communities, of which the methods based on planar markers are easy to be implemented. However, most of the existing methods need to identify multiple points in the marker images for matching to space points. Then, PnP and RANSAC are used to compute the camera pose. If cameras move fast or are far away from markers, matching is easy to generate errors and even RANSAC cannot remove incorrect matching. Then, the result by PnP cannot have good performance. To solve this problem, we design circular markers and represent 6…
Bioinformatics Institute, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局生物信息学研究所）
Pose estimation, tracking, and action recognition of articulated objects from depth images are important and challenging problems, which are normally considered separately. In this paper, a unified paradigm based on Lie group theory is proposed, which enables us to collectively address these related problems. Our approach is also applicable to a wide range of articulated objects. Empirically it is evaluated on lab animals including mouse and fish, as well as on human hand. On these applications, it is shown to deliver competitive results compared to the state-of-the-arts, and non-trivial basel…
Event-based Motion & Appearance Fusion for 6D Object Pose Tracking
Event-driven Perception for Robotics, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy（事件驱动感知机器人实验室，意大利理工学院）；Humanoid Sensing and Perception, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy（人形感知与感知，意大利理工学院）；University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy（热那亚大学，意大利）
Efficient Online 3D Multi-Camera Multi-Object Tracking and Pose Estimation
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science（电子工程与计算机科学学院）；School of Electrical Engineering, Computing and Mathematical Sciences（电子工程、计算与数学科学学院）；School of Engineering and Technology（工程与技术学院）
Estimating 3D poses of multiple humans in real-time is a classic but still challenging task in computer vision. Its major difficulty lies in the ambiguity in cross-view association of 2D poses and the huge state space when there are multiple people in multiple views. In this paper, we present a novel solution for multi-human 3D pose estimation from multiple calibrated camera views. It takes 2D poses in different camera coordinates as inputs and aims for the accurate 3D poses in the global coordinate. Unlike previous methods that associate 2D poses among all pairs of views from scratch at every…
Tracking object poses in 3D is a crucial building block for Augmented Reality applications. We propose an instant motion tracking system that tracks an object's pose in space (represented by its 3D bounding box) in real-time on mobile devices. Our system does not require any prior sensory calibration or initialization to function. We employ a deep neural network to detect objects and estimate their initial 3D pose. Then the estimated pose is tracked using a robust planar tracker. Our tracker is capable of performing relative-scale 9-DoF tracking in real-time on mobile devices. By combining use…
National Technical University of Athens（雅典国家技术大学）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）
We present a novel multi-attentional convolutional architecture to tackle the problem of real-time RGB-D 6D object pose tracking of single, known objects. Such a problem poses multiple challenges originating both from the objects' nature and their interaction with their environment, which previous approaches have failed to fully address. The proposed framework encapsulates methods for background clutter and occlusion handling by integrating multiple parallel soft spatial attention modules into a multitask Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture. Moreover, we consider the special geomet…
GRC-Pose: Generation-Reconstruction Correspondence for Prior-Free 6D Object Pose Tracking
School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学自动化学院）；Zhongguancun Academy（中关村学院）；Artificial Intelligence Academy, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学人工智能学院）；School of Information and Communication Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学信息与通信工程学院）
In this work we propose an online multi person pose tracking approach which works on two consecutive frames $I_{t-1}$ and $I_t$. The general formulation of our temporal network allows to rely on any multi person pose estimation approach as spatial network. From the spatial network we extract image features and pose features for both frames. These features serve as input for our temporal model that predicts Temporal Flow Fields (TFF). These TFF are vector fields which indicate the direction in which each body joint is going to move from frame $I_{t-1}$ to frame $I_t$. This novel representation …
Unconstrained remote gaze tracking using off-the-shelf cameras is a challenging problem. Recently, promising algorithms for appearance-based gaze estimation using convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been proposed. Improving their robustness to various confounding factors including variable head pose, subject identity, illumination and image quality remain open problems. In this work, we study the effect of variable head pose on machine learning regressors trained to estimate gaze direction. We propose a novel branched CNN architecture that improves the robustness of gaze classifiers to va…
Model based methods to marker-free motion capture have a very high computational overhead that make them unattractive. In this paper we describe a method that improves on existing global optimization techniques to tracking articulated objects. Our method improves on the state-of-the-art Annealed Particle Filter (APF) by reusing samples across annealing layers and by using an adaptive parametric density for diffusion. We compare the proposed method with APF on a scalable problem and study how the two methods scale with the dimensionality, multi-modality and the range of search. Then we perform …
In this work we propose an approach for estimating 3D human poses of multiple people from a set of calibrated cameras. Estimating 3D human poses from multiple views has several compelling properties: human poses are estimated within a global coordinate space and multiple cameras provide an extended field of view which helps in resolving ambiguities, occlusions and motion blur. Our approach builds upon a real-time 2D multi-person pose estimation system and greedily solves the association problem between multiple views. We utilize bipartite matching to track multiple people over multiple frames.…
We present a novel approach for estimating the 2D pose of an articulated object with an application to automated video analysis of small laboratory animals. We have found that deformable part models developed for humans, exemplified by the flexible mixture of parts (FMP) model, typically fail on challenging animal poses. We argue that beyond encoding appearance and spatial relations, shape is needed to overcome the lack of distinctive landmarks on laboratory animal bodies. In our approach, a shape consistent FMP (scFMP) model computes promising pose candidates after a standard FMP model is use…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology（电子科技大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）
In this paper, we propose a generative framework that unifies depth-based 3D facial pose tracking and face model adaptation on-the-fly, in the unconstrained scenarios with heavy occlusions and arbitrary facial expression variations. Specifically, we introduce a statistical 3D morphable model that flexibly describes the distribution of points on the surface of the face model, with an efficient switchable online adaptation that gradually captures the identity of the tracked subject and rapidly constructs a suitable face model when the subject changes. Moreover, unlike prior art that employed ICP…
