Vision based human pose estimation is an non-invasive technology for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Direct use of the hand as an input device provides an attractive interaction method, with no need for specialized sensing equipment, such as exoskeletons, gloves etc, but a camera. Traditionally, HCI is employed in various applications spreading in areas including manufacturing, surgery, entertainment industry and architecture, to mention a few. Deployment of vision based human pose estimation algorithms can give a breath of innovation to these applications. In this letter, we present a novel Convolutional Neural Network architecture, reinforced with a Self-Attention module that it can be deployed on an embedded system, due to its lightweight nature, with just 1.9 Million parameters. The source code and qualitative results are publicly available.
We present MoVNect, a lightweight deep neural network to capture 3D human pose using a single RGB camera. To improve the overall performance of the model, we apply the teacher-student learning method based knowledge distillation to 3D human pose estimation. Real-time post-processing makes the CNN output yield temporally stable 3D skeletal information, which can be used in applications directly. We implement a 3D avatar application running on mobile in real-time to demonstrate that our network achieves both high accuracy and fast inference time. Extensive evaluations show the advantages of our …
LGM-Pose: A Lightweight Global Modeling Network for Real-time Human Pose Estimation
School of Computer Science and Information Security（计算机科学与信息安全学院）；Guilin University of Electronic Technology（桂林电子科技大学）；Guangxi Metaverse Application Engineering Center（广西元宇宙应用工程中心）；Guangxi Key Laboratory of Trusted Software（广西可信软件重点实验室）；School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Shenzhen Graduate School（电子与计算机工程学院，深圳研究生院）；Peking University（北京大学）
University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）
There is an increasing demand for lightweight multi-person pose estimation for many emerging smart IoT applications. However, the existing algorithms tend to have large model sizes and intense computational requirements, making them ill-suited for real-time applications and deployment on resource-constrained hardware. Lightweight and real-time approaches are exceedingly rare and come at the cost of inferior accuracy. In this paper, we present EfficientHRNet, a family of lightweight multi-person human pose estimators that are able to perform in real-time on resource-constrained devices. By unif…
Recent research on human pose estimation has achieved significant improvement. However, most existing methods tend to pursue higher scores using complex architecture or computationally expensive models on benchmark datasets, ignoring the deployment costs in practice. In this paper, we investigate the problem of simple and lightweight human pose estimation. We first redesign a lightweight bottleneck block with two non-novel concepts: depthwise convolution and attention mechanism. And then, based on the lightweight block, we present a Lightweight Pose Network (LPN) following the architecture des…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Recent research on human pose estimation exploits complex structures to improve performance on benchmark datasets, ignoring the resource overhead and inference speed when the model is actually deployed. In this paper, we lighten the computation cost and parameters of the deconvolution head network in SimpleBaseline and introduce an attention mechanism that utilizes original, inter-level, and intra-level information to intensify the accuracy. Additionally, we propose a novel loss function called heatmap weighting loss, which generates weights for each pixel on the heatmap that makes the model m…
SasMamba: A Lightweight Structure-Aware Stride State Space Model for 3D Human Pose Estimation
Information and Management Systems Engineering, Nagaoka University of Technology（名古屋技术大学信息与管理系统工程系）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Xi’an University of Posts and Telecommunications（西安邮电大学计算机科学与技术学院）
Seeing Through WiFi: Lightweight Human Pose Estimation with Dynamic Kernel Attention
Smart Green Transformation Center (GREEN-X), VinUniversity（智能绿色转型中心（GREEN-X），文大大学）；Trinity College Dublin（都柏林三一学院）；University of Oulu（奥卢大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；PHENIKAA University（菲尼卡大学）；SnT, University of Luxembourg（卢森堡大学SnT）
HDiffTG: A Lightweight Hybrid Diffusion-Transformer-GCN Architecture for 3D Human Pose Estimation
College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University（浙江大学信息科学与电子工程学院）；Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau（澳门大学科学与技术学院）；College of Mechatronics and Control Engineering, Shenzhen University（深圳大学机电与控制工程学院）；School of AI and Advanced Computing, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西安交通大学利物浦大学人工智能与高级计算学院）；School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University（新加坡管理学院计算机与信息系统学院）
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.
WiFlow: A Lightweight WiFi-based Continuous Human Pose Estimation Network with Spatio-Temporal Feature Decoupling
Faculty of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Kunming University of Science and Technology（昆明理工大学机电工程学院）；Shanghai ChingMu Vision Technology Co. Ltd（上海清目视觉科技有限公司）
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Microsoft（微软）
We present an efficient high-resolution network, Lite-HRNet, for human pose estimation. We start by simply applying the efficient shuffle block in ShuffleNet to HRNet (high-resolution network), yielding stronger performance over popular lightweight networks, such as MobileNet, ShuffleNet, and Small HRNet. We find that the heavily-used pointwise (1x1) convolutions in shuffle blocks become the computational bottleneck. We introduce a lightweight unit, conditional channel weighting, to replace costly pointwise (1x1) convolutions in shuffle blocks. The complexity of channel weighting is linear w.r…
We propose a novel efficient and lightweight model for human pose estimation from a single image. Our model is designed to achieve competitive results at a fraction of the number of parameters and computational cost of various state-of-the-art methods. To this end, we explicitly incorporate part-based structural and geometric priors in a hierarchical prediction framework. At the coarsest resolution, and in a manner similar to classical part-based approaches, we leverage the kinematic structure of the human body to propagate convolutional feature updates between the keypoints or body parts. Unl…
Human pose estimation (HPE) is a classical task in computer vision that focuses on representing the orientation of a person by identifying the positions of their joints. We design a lighterversion of the stacked hourglass network with minimal loss in performance of the model. The lightweight 2-stacked hourglass has a reduced number of channels with depthwise separable convolutions, residual connections with concatenation, and residual connections between the necks of the hourglasses. The final model has a marginal drop in performance with 79% reduction in the number of parameters and a similar…
Seoul National University（首尔大学）；Kwangwoon University（光云大学）
Most of the existing deep learning-based methods for 3D hand and human pose estimation from a single depth map are based on a common framework that takes a 2D depth map and directly regresses the 3D coordinates of keypoints, such as hand or human body joints, via 2D convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The first weakness of this approach is the presence of perspective distortion in the 2D depth map. While the depth map is intrinsically 3D data, many previous methods treat depth maps as 2D images that can distort the shape of the actual object through projection from 3D to 2D space. This compe…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Beike（贝壳）
In this paper, we delve into semi-supervised 2D human pose estimation. The previous method ignored two problems: (i) When conducting interactive training between large model and lightweight model, the pseudo label of lightweight model will be used to guide large models. (ii) The negative impact of noise pseudo labels on training. Moreover, the labels used for 2D human pose estimation are relatively complex: keypoint category and keypoint position. To solve the problems mentioned above, we propose a semi-supervised 2D human pose estimation framework driven by a position inconsistency pseudo lab…
3D human pose estimation using monocular images is an important yet challenging task. Existing 3D pose detection methods exhibit excellent performance under normal conditions however their performance may degrade due to occlusion. Recently some occlusion aware methods have also been proposed, however, the occlusion handling capability of these networks has not yet been thoroughly investigated. In the current work, we propose an occlusion-guided 3D human pose estimation framework and quantify its occlusion handling capability by using different protocols. The proposed method estimates more accu…
University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）；University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）
Existing deep learning-based human mesh reconstruction approaches have a tendency to build larger networks in order to achieve higher accuracy. Computational complexity and model size are often neglected, despite being key characteristics for practical use of human mesh reconstruction models (e.g. virtual try-on systems). In this paper, we present GTRS, a lightweight pose-based method that can reconstruct human mesh from 2D human pose. We propose a pose analysis module that uses graph transformers to exploit structured and implicit joint correlations, and a mesh regression module that combines…
This paper presents a lightweight network for head pose estimation (HPE) task. While previous approaches rely on convolutional neural networks, the proposed network \textit{LwPosr} uses mixture of depthwise separable convolutional (DSC) and transformer encoder layers which are structured in two streams and three stages to provide fine-grained regression for predicting head poses. The quantitative and qualitative demonstration is provided to show that the proposed network is able to learn head poses efficiently while using less parameter space. Extensive ablations are conducted using three open…
University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）；College of Computing and Informatics（计算与信息学院）
In this research, we address the challenge faced by existing deep learning-based human mesh reconstruction methods in balancing accuracy and computational efficiency. These methods typically prioritize accuracy, resulting in large network sizes and excessive computational complexity, which may hinder their practical application in real-world scenarios, such as virtual reality systems. To address this issue, we introduce a modular multi-stage lightweight graph-based transformer network for human pose and shape estimation from 2D human pose, a pose-based human mesh reconstruction approach that p…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Siemens AG（西门子公司）
We propose a lightweight retrieval-based pipeline to predict 6DOF camera poses from RGB images. Our pipeline uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) to encode a query image as a feature vector. A nearest neighbor lookup finds the pose-wise nearest database image. A siamese convolutional neural network regresses the relative pose from the nearest neighboring database image to the query image. The relative pose is then applied to the nearest neighboring absolute pose to obtain the query image's final absolute pose prediction. Our model is a distilled version of NN-Net that reduces its paramete…
Active Shape Model (ASM) is a statistical model of object shapes that represents a target structure. ASM can guide machine learning algorithms to fit a set of points representing an object (e.g., face) onto an image. This paper presents a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture with a loss function being assisted by ASM for face alignment and estimating head pose in the wild. We use ASM to first guide the network towards learning a smoother distribution of the facial landmark points. Inspired by transfer learning, during the training process, we gradually harden the regress…
We present a lightweight solution to recover 3D pose from multi-view images captured with spatially calibrated cameras. Building upon recent advances in interpretable representation learning, we exploit 3D geometry to fuse input images into a unified latent representation of pose, which is disentangled from camera view-points. This allows us to reason effectively about 3D pose across different views without using compute-intensive volumetric grids. Our architecture then conditions the learned representation on camera projection operators to produce accurate per-view 2d detections, that can be …
Identifying the camera pose for a given image is a challenging problem with applications in robotics, autonomous vehicles, and augmented/virtual reality. Lately, learning-based methods have shown to be effective for absolute camera pose estimation. However, these methods are not accurate when generalizing to different domains. In this paper, a domain adaptive training framework for absolute pose regression is introduced. In the proposed framework, the scene image is augmented for different domains by using generative methods to train parallel branches using Barlow Twins objective. The parallel…
In this work we adapt multi-person pose estimation architecture to use it on edge devices. We follow the bottom-up approach from OpenPose, the winner of COCO 2016 Keypoints Challenge, because of its decent quality and robustness to number of people inside the frame. With proposed network design and optimized post-processing code the full solution runs at 28 frames per second (fps) on Intel$\unicode{xAE}$ NUC 6i7KYB mini PC and 26 fps on Core$^{TM}$ i7-6850K CPU. The network model has 4.1M parameters and 9 billions floating-point operations (GFLOPs) complexity, which is just ~15% of the baselin…
Recent years have witnessed great success for hand reconstruction in real-time applications such as visual reality and augmented reality while interacting with two-hand reconstruction through efficient transformers is left unexplored. In this paper, we propose a method called lightweight attention hand (LWA-HAND) to reconstruct hands in low flops from a single RGB image. To solve the occlusion and interaction problem in efficient attention architectures, we propose three mobile attention modules in this paper. The first module is a lightweight feature attention module that extracts both local …
UBTech Robotics Corp Ltd（优必选机器人股份有限公司）；Shanghaitech University（上海科技大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research（信息通信研究院）
With the emergence of service robots and surveillance cameras, dynamic face recognition (DFR) in wild has received much attention in recent years. Face detection and head pose estimation are two important steps for DFR. Very often, the pose is estimated after the face detection. However, such sequential computations lead to higher latency. In this paper, we propose a low latency and lightweight network for simultaneous face detection, landmark localization and head pose estimation. Inspired by the observation that it is more challenging to locate the facial landmarks for faces with large angle…
GMatch: A Lightweight, Geometry-Constrained Keypoint Matcher for Zero-Shot 6DoF Pose Estimation in Robotic Grasp Tasks
The State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China（多模态人工智能系统国家重点实验室，自动化研究所，中国科学院，北京）
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) aim at extending deep learning to arbitrary irregular domains, namely graphs. Their success is highly dependent on how the topology of input graphs is defined and most of the existing GCN architectures rely on predefined or handcrafted graph structures. In this paper, we introduce a novel method that learns the topology (or connectivity) of input graphs as a part of GCN design. The main contribution of our method resides in building an orthogonal connectivity basis that optimally aggregates nodes, through their neighborhood, prior to achieve convolution. Our…
Although deep convolution neural networks (DCNN) have achieved excellent performance in human pose estimation, these networks often have a large number of parameters and computations, leading to the slow inference speed. For this issue, an effective solution is knowledge distillation, which transfers knowledge from a large pre-trained network (teacher) to a small network (student). However, there are some defects in the existing approaches: (I) Only a single teacher is adopted, neglecting the potential that a student can learn from multiple teachers. (II) The human segmentation mask can be reg…
Estimating the 3D pose of a hand is an essential part of human-computer interaction. Estimating 3D pose using depth or multi-view sensors has become easier with recent advances in computer vision, however, regressing pose from a single RGB image is much less straightforward. The main difficulty arises from the fact that 3D pose requires some form of depth estimates, which are ambiguous given only an RGB image. In this paper we propose a new method for 3D hand pose estimation from a monocular image through a novel 2.5D pose representation. Our new representation estimates pose up to a scaling f…
Accurate hand pose estimation at joint level has several uses on human-robot interaction, user interfacing and virtual reality applications. Yet, it currently is not a solved problem. The novel deep learning techniques could make a great improvement on this matter but they need a huge amount of annotated data. The hand pose datasets released so far present some issues that make them impossible to use on deep learning methods such as the few number of samples, high-level abstraction annotations or samples consisting in depth maps. In this work, we introduce a multiview hand pose dataset in whic…
Indian Institute of Information Technology Pune（印度信息技术学院浦那分院）
Hand pose estimation from monocular depth images has been an important and challenging problem in the Computer Vision community. In this paper, we present a novel approach to estimate 3D hand joint locations from 2D depth images. Unlike most of the previous methods, our model captures the 3D spatial information from a depth image thereby giving it a greater understanding of the input. We voxelize the input depth map to capture the 3D features of the input and perform 3D data augmentations to make our network robust to real-world images. Our network is trained in an end-to-end manner which redu…
In this paper, we address the problem of estimating the hand pose from the egocentric view when the hand is interacting with objects. Specifically, we propose a method to label a dataset Ego-Siam which contains the egocentric images pair-wisely. We also use the collected pairwise data to train our encoder-decoder style network which has been proven efficient in. This could bring extra training efficiency and testing accuracy. Our network is lightweight and can be performed with over 30 FPS with an outdated GPU. We demonstrate that our method outperforms Mueller et al. which is the state of the…
Hand pose estimation from a single depth image is an essential topic in computer vision and human computer interaction. Despite recent advancements in this area promoted by convolutional neural network, accurate hand pose estimation is still a challenging problem. In this paper we propose a Pose guided structured Region Ensemble Network (Pose-REN) to boost the performance of hand pose estimation. The proposed method extracts regions from the feature maps of convolutional neural network under the guide of an initially estimated pose, generating more optimal and representative features for hand …
Articulated hand pose estimation is a challenging task for human-computer interaction. The state-of-the-art hand pose estimation algorithms work only with one or a few subjects for which they have been calibrated or trained. Particularly, the hybrid methods based on learning followed by model fitting or model based deep learning do not explicitly consider varying hand shapes and sizes. In this work, we introduce a novel hybrid algorithm for estimating the 3D hand pose as well as bone-lengths of the hand skeleton at the same time, from a single depth image. The proposed CNN architecture learns …
UST-Hand: An Uncertainty-aware Spatiotemporal Point Cloud Interaction Network for 3D Self-supervised Hand Pose Estimation
School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学计算机科学学院）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Defense Innovation Institute, Academy of Military Sciences（国防科技创新院，军事科学学院）；Tianjin Artificial Intelligence Innovation Center（天津人工智能创新中心）
This paper addresses the problem of 3D hand pose estimation from a monocular RGB image. While previous methods have shown great success, the structure of hands has not been fully exploited, which is critical in pose estimation. To this end, we propose a regularized graph representation learning under a conditional adversarial learning framework for 3D hand pose estimation, aiming to capture structural inter-dependencies of hand joints. In particular, we estimate an initial hand pose from a parametric hand model as a prior of hand structure, which regularizes the inference of the structural def…
University of California, Irvine（加利福尼亚大学欧文分校）；Tencent Medical AI Lab（腾讯医疗人工智能实验室）；Academia Sinica（中央研究院）
Hand pose estimation from a monocular RGB image is an important but challenging task. The main factor affecting its performance is the lack of a sufficiently large training dataset with accurate hand-keypoint annotations. In this work, we circumvent this problem by proposing an effective method for generating realistic hand poses and show that state-of-the-art algorithms for hand pose estimation can be greatly improved by utilizing the generated hand poses as training data. Specifically, we first adopt an augmented reality (AR) simulator to synthesize hand poses with accurate hand-keypoint lab…
Tencent Hippocrates Research Lab（腾讯希波克拉底研究实验室）；University of California at Irvine（加州大学欧文分校）
Hand pose estimation is more challenging than body pose estimation due to severe articulation, self-occlusion and high dexterity of the hand. Current approaches often rely on a popular body pose algorithm, such as the Convolutional Pose Machine (CPM), to learn 2D keypoint features. These algorithms cannot adequately address the unique challenges of hand pose estimation, because they are trained solely based on keypoint positions without seeking to explicitly model structural relationship between them. We propose a novel Nonparametric Structure Regularization Machine (NSRM) for 2D hand pose est…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；SenseTime Research and Tetras.AI（商汤研究院与Tetras.AI）；Shanghai AI Lab（上海人工智能实验室）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
Estimating 3D interacting hand pose from a single RGB image is essential for understanding human actions. Unlike most previous works that directly predict the 3D poses of two interacting hands simultaneously, we propose to decompose the challenging interacting hand pose estimation task and estimate the pose of each hand separately. In this way, it is straightforward to take advantage of the latest research progress on the single-hand pose estimation system. However, hand pose estimation in interacting scenarios is very challenging, due to (1) severe hand-hand occlusion and (2) ambiguity caused…
In this work we study the use of 3D hand poses to recognize first-person dynamic hand actions interacting with 3D objects. Towards this goal, we collected RGB-D video sequences comprised of more than 100K frames of 45 daily hand action categories, involving 26 different objects in several hand configurations. To obtain hand pose annotations, we used our own mo-cap system that automatically infers the 3D location of each of the 21 joints of a hand model via 6 magnetic sensors and inverse kinematics. Additionally, we recorded the 6D object poses and provide 3D object models for a subset of hand-…
