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. Unlike classical approaches, we adopt end-to-end training to learn this geometric prior through feature updates from data. We then propagate the feature representation at the coarsest resolution up the hierarchy to refine the predicted pose in a coarse-to-fine fashion. The final network effectively models the geometric prior and intuition within a lightweight deep neural network, yielding state-of-the-art results for a model of this size on two standard datasets, Leeds Sports Pose and MPII Human Pose.
RePose: A Real-Time 3D Human Pose Estimation and Biomechanical Analysis Framework for Rehabilitation
Zhejiang Lab（浙江实验室）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；Zhengzhou University（郑州大学）；Dalian Minzu University（大连民族大学）；Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；Fuyao University of Science and Technology（福耀科技大学）；Xianghu Lab（翔虎实验室）
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Tokyo Institute of Technology（东京工业大学）
We present RePOSE, a fast iterative refinement method for 6D object pose estimation. Prior methods perform refinement by feeding zoomed-in input and rendered RGB images into a CNN and directly regressing an update of a refined pose. Their runtime is slow due to the computational cost of CNN, which is especially prominent in multiple-object pose refinement. To overcome this problem, RePOSE leverages image rendering for fast feature extraction using a 3D model with a learnable texture. We call this deep texture rendering, which uses a shallow multi-layer perceptron to directly regress a view-inv…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Due to the lack of diversity of datasets, the generalization ability of the pose estimator is poor. To solve this problem, we propose a pose augmentation solution via DH forward kinematics model, which we call DH-AUG. We observe that the previous work is all based on single-frame pose augmentation, if it is directly applied to video pose estimator, there will be several previously ignored problems: (i) angle ambiguity in bone rotation (multiple solutions); (ii) the generated skeleton video lacks movement continuity. To solve these problems, we propose a special generator based on DH forward ki…
Learning articulated object pose is inherently difficult because the pose is high dimensional but has many structural constraints. Most existing work do not model such constraints and does not guarantee the geometric validity of their pose estimation, therefore requiring a post-processing to recover the correct geometry if desired, which is cumbersome and sub-optimal. In this work, we propose to directly embed a kinematic object model into the deep neutral network learning for general articulated object pose estimation. The kinematic function is defined on the appropriately parameterized objec…
Previous video-based human pose estimation methods have shown promising results by leveraging aggregated features of consecutive frames. However, most approaches compromise accuracy to mitigate jitter or do not sufficiently comprehend the temporal aspects of human motion. Furthermore, occlusion increases uncertainty between consecutive frames, which results in unsmooth results. To address these issues, we design an architecture that exploits the keypoint kinematic features with the following components. First, we effectively capture the temporal features by leveraging individual keypoint's vel…
Estimation of 3D human pose from monocular image has gained considerable attention, as a key step to several human-centric applications. However, generalizability of human pose estimation models developed using supervision on large-scale in-studio datasets remains questionable, as these models often perform unsatisfactorily on unseen in-the-wild environments. Though weakly-supervised models have been proposed to address this shortcoming, performance of such models relies on availability of paired supervision on some related tasks, such as 2D pose or multi-view image pairs. In contrast, we prop…
RePoseD: Efficient Relative Pose Estimation With Known Depth Information
Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克技术大学）；Comenius University in Bratislava（布拉迪斯拉发夸美纽斯大学）；Nankai University（南开大学）；Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics（捷克信息学、机器人学与控制论研究所）
There exist challenging problems in 3D human pose estimation mission, such as poor performance caused by occlusion and self-occlusion. Recently, IMU-vision sensor fusion is regarded as valuable for solving these problems. However, previous researches on the fusion of IMU and vision data, which is heterogeneous, fail to adequately utilize either IMU raw data or reliable high-level vision features. To facilitate a more efficient sensor fusion, in this work we propose a framework called \emph{FusePose} under a parametric human kinematic model. Specifically, we aggregate different information of I…
Kinematics Modeling Network for Video-based Human Pose Estimation
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Chinese Academy of Surveying and Mapping（中国测绘科学研究院）；Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）
Progressive Inertial Poser: Progressive Real-Time Kinematic Chain Estimation for 3D Full-Body Pose from Three IMU Sensors
School of Communication Engineering, Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学通信工程学院）；Key Laboratory of Micro-nano Sensing and IoT of Wenzhou, Wenzhou Institute of Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学温州市微纳传感与物联网重点实验室）；School of Control Science and Engineering, Tiangong University（天津工业大学控制科学与工程学院）；College of Business, Lishui University（丽水学院商学院）；Costar Intelligent Optoelectronics Technology Co.,Ltd（Costar智能光电技术有限公司）；School of Automation, Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学自动化学院）；Faculty of Applied Sciences, Macao Polytechnic University（澳门理工学院应用科学学院）；School of software and BNRist, Tsinghua University（清华大学软件学院）
Accurate estimation of 3D human motion from monocular video requires modeling both kinematics (body motion without physical forces) and dynamics (motion with physical forces). To demonstrate this, we present SimPoE, a Simulation-based approach for 3D human Pose Estimation, which integrates image-based kinematic inference and physics-based dynamics modeling. SimPoE learns a policy that takes as input the current-frame pose estimate and the next image frame to control a physically-simulated character to output the next-frame pose estimate. The policy contains a learnable kinematic pose refinemen…
Computer vision/deep learning-based 3D human pose estimation methods aim to localize human joints from images and videos. Pose representation is normally limited to 3D joint positional/translational degrees of freedom (3DOFs), however, a further three rotational DOFs (6DOFs) are required for many potential biomechanical applications. Positional DOFs are insufficient to analytically solve for joint rotational DOFs in a 3D human skeletal model. Therefore, we propose a temporal inverse kinematics (IK) optimization technique to infer joint orientations throughout a biomechanically informed, and su…
This paper addresses the problem of 2D pose representation during unsupervised 2D to 3D pose lifting to improve the accuracy, stability and generalisability of 3D human pose estimation (HPE) models. All unsupervised 2D-3D HPE approaches provide the entire 2D kinematic skeleton to a model during training. We argue that this is sub-optimal and disruptive as long-range correlations are induced between independent 2D key points and predicted 3D ordinates during training. To this end, we conduct the following study. With a maximum architecture capacity of 6 residual blocks, we evaluate the performa…
University of Innsbruck（因斯布鲁克大学）；University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）
Injury analysis may be one of the most beneficial applications of deep learning based human pose estimation. To facilitate further research on this topic, we provide an injury specific 2D dataset for alpine skiing, covering in total 533 images. We further propose a post processing routine, that combines rotational information with a simple kinematic model. We could improve detection results in fall situations by up to 21% regarding the PCK@0.2 metric.
Joint angle based learning to refine kinematic human pose estimation
Department of Engineering Mechanics, School of Civil Engineering and Transportation, South China University of Technology（工程力学系，交通工程学院，华南理工大学）；School of Mechanics and Construction Engineering, Jinan University（机械与建筑工程学院，暨南大学）；Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Speed Capability, School of Physical Education, Jinan University（广东省速度能力重点实验室，暨南大学体育学院）
We propose a method SPGNet for 3D human pose estimation that mixes multi-dimensional re-projection into supervised learning. In this method, the 2D-to-3D-lifting network predicts the global position and coordinates of the 3D human pose. Then, we re-project the estimated 3D pose back to the 2D key points along with spatial adjustments. The loss functions compare the estimated 3D pose with the 3D pose ground truth, and re-projected 2D pose with the input 2D pose. In addition, we propose a kinematic constraint to restrict the predicted target with constant human bone length. Based on the estimati…
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Saarland University（萨尔大学）；Universidad Rey Juan Carlos（胡安卡洛斯国王大学）
We present the first real-time method to capture the full global 3D skeletal pose of a human in a stable, temporally consistent manner using a single RGB camera. Our method combines a new convolutional neural network (CNN) based pose regressor with kinematic skeleton fitting. Our novel fully-convolutional pose formulation regresses 2D and 3D joint positions jointly in real time and does not require tightly cropped input frames. A real-time kinematic skeleton fitting method uses the CNN output to yield temporally stable 3D global pose reconstructions on the basis of a coherent kinematic skeleto…
Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院机器人与智能机器研究所）
Robots have the potential to assist people in bed, such as in healthcare settings, yet bedding materials like sheets and blankets can make observation of the human body difficult for robots. A pressure-sensing mat on a bed can provide pressure images that are relatively insensitive to bedding materials. However, prior work on estimating human pose from pressure images has been restricted to 2D pose estimates and flat beds. In this work, we present two convolutional neural networks to estimate the 3D joint positions of a person in a configurable bed from a single pressure image. The first netwo…
University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；San Diego State University（圣地亚哥州立大学）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）
In this paper, we propose a pose grammar to tackle the problem of 3D human pose estimation. Our model directly takes 2D pose as input and learns a generalized 2D-3D mapping function. The proposed model consists of a base network which efficiently captures pose-aligned features and a hierarchy of Bi-directional RNNs (BRNN) on the top to explicitly incorporate a set of knowledge regarding human body configuration (i.e., kinematics, symmetry, motor coordination). The proposed model thus enforces high-level constraints over human poses. In learning, we develop a pose sample simulator to augment tr…
Guangdong University of Technology（广东工业大学）；Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Spatio-temporal information is key to resolve occlusion and depth ambiguity in 3D pose estimation. Previous methods have focused on either temporal contexts or local-to-global architectures that embed fixed-length spatio-temporal information. To date, there have not been effective proposals to simultaneously and flexibly capture varying spatio-temporal sequences and effectively achieves real-time 3D pose estimation. In this work, we improve the learning of kinematic constraints in the human skeleton: posture, local kinematic connections, and symmetry by modeling local and global spatial inform…
MPI for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Facebook Reality Labs（Facebook现实实验室）
Human re-rendering from a single image is a starkly under-constrained problem, and state-of-the-art algorithms often exhibit undesired artefacts, such as over-smoothing, unrealistic distortions of the body parts and garments, or implausible changes of the texture. To address these challenges, we propose a new method for neural re-rendering of a human under a novel user-defined pose and viewpoint, given one input image. Our algorithm represents body pose and shape as a parametric mesh which can be reconstructed from a single image and easily reposed. Instead of a colour-based UV texture map, ou…
Hanoi University of Science and Technology（河内科技大学）；MICA International Research Institute（MICA国际研究院）；Asilla Inc.（Asilla公司）
3D hand pose estimation from RGB images suffers from the difficulty of obtaining the depth information. Therefore, a great deal of attention has been spent on estimating 3D hand pose from 2D hand joints. In this paper, we leverage the advantage of spatial-temporal Graph Convolutional Neural Networks and propose LG-Hand, a powerful method for 3D hand pose estimation. Our method incorporates both spatial and temporal dependencies into a single process. We argue that kinematic information plays an important role, contributing to the performance of 3D hand pose estimation. We thereby introduce two…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；OPPO US Research Center（OPPO美国研究中心）
Estimating 3D human pose and shape from a single image is highly under-constrained. To address this ambiguity, we propose a novel prior, namely kinematic dictionary, which explicitly regularizes the solution space of relative 3D rotations of human joints in the kinematic tree. Integrated with a statistical human model and a deep neural network, our method achieves end-to-end 3D reconstruction without the need of using any shape annotations during the training of neural networks. The kinematic dictionary bridges the gap between in-the-wild images and 3D datasets, and thus facilitates end-to-end…
We propose a method for incorporating object interaction and human body dynamics into the task of 3D ego-pose estimation using a head-mounted camera. We use a kinematics model of the human body to represent the entire range of human motion, and a dynamics model of the body to interact with objects inside a physics simulator. By bringing together object modeling, kinematics modeling, and dynamics modeling in a reinforcement learning (RL) framework, we enable object-aware 3D ego-pose estimation. We devise several representational innovations through the design of the state and action space to in…
Estimating 3D poses and shapes in the form of meshes from monocular RGB images is challenging. Obviously, it is more difficult than estimating 3D poses only in the form of skeletons or heatmaps. When interacting persons are involved, the 3D mesh reconstruction becomes more challenging due to the ambiguity introduced by person-to-person occlusions. To tackle the challenges, we propose a coarse-to-fine pipeline that benefits from 1) inverse kinematics from the occlusion-robust 3D skeleton estimation and 2) Transformer-based relation-aware refinement techniques. In our pipeline, we first obtain o…
This paper addresses the problem of 3D human body shape and pose estimation from an RGB image. This is often an ill-posed problem, since multiple plausible 3D bodies may match the visual evidence present in the input - particularly when the subject is occluded. Thus, it is desirable to estimate a distribution over 3D body shape and pose conditioned on the input image instead of a single 3D reconstruction. We train a deep neural network to estimate a hierarchical matrix-Fisher distribution over relative 3D joint rotation matrices (i.e. body pose), which exploits the human body's kinematic tree …
Qing Yuan Research Institute（清源研究院）；Qi Zhi Institute（期智研究院）；AI Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学人工智能研究院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Model-based 3D pose and shape estimation methods reconstruct a full 3D mesh for the human body by estimating several parameters. However, learning the abstract parameters is a highly non-linear process and suffers from image-model misalignment, leading to mediocre model performance. In contrast, 3D keypoint estimation methods combine deep CNN network with the volumetric representation to achieve pixel-level localization accuracy but may predict unrealistic body structure. In this paper, we address the above issues by bridging the gap between body mesh estimation and 3D keypoint estimation. We …
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Shanghai Advanced Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院上海高等研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Vision and Imaging（上海智能视觉与成像工程技术研究中心）
This paper presents an inverse kinematic optimization layer (IKOL) for 3D human pose and shape estimation that leverages the strength of both optimization- and regression-based methods within an end-to-end framework. IKOL involves a nonconvex optimization that establishes an implicit mapping from an image's 3D keypoints and body shapes to the relative body-part rotations. The 3D keypoints and the body shapes are the inputs and the relative body-part rotations are the solutions. However, this procedure is implicit and hard to make differentiable. So, to overcome this issue, we designed a Gauss-…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；German Aerospace Center（德国航空航天中心）
Since the emergence of large annotated datasets, state-of-the-art hand pose estimation methods have been mostly based on discriminative learning. Recently, a hybrid approach has embedded a kinematic layer into the deep learning structure in such a way that the pose estimates obey the physical constraints of human hand kinematics. However, the existing approach relies on a single person's hand shape parameters, which are fixed constants. Therefore, the existing hybrid method has problems to generalize to new, unseen hands. In this work, we extend the kinematic layer to make the hand shape param…
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science（电气工程与计算机科学学院）；Kitware, Inc（Kitware公司）；The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）
To gain an understanding of the relation between a given human pose image and the corresponding physical foot pressure of the human subject, we propose and validate two end-to-end deep learning architectures, PressNet and PressNet-Simple, to regress foot pressure heatmaps (dynamics) from 2D human pose (kinematics) derived from a video frame. A unique video and foot pressure data set of 813,050 synchronized pairs, composed of 5-minute long choreographed Taiji movement sequences of 6 subjects, is collected and used for leaving-one-subject-out cross validation. Our initial experimental results de…
Discriminative methods often generate hand poses kinematically implausible, then generative methods are used to correct (or verify) these results in a hybrid method. Estimating 3D hand pose in a hierarchy, where the high-dimensional output space is decomposed into smaller ones, has been shown effective. Existing hierarchical methods mainly focus on the decomposition of the output space while the input space remains almost the same along the hierarchy. In this paper, a hybrid hand pose estimation method is proposed by applying the kinematic hierarchy strategy to the input space (as well as the …
Kitware, Inc（Kitware公司）；The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）
Pose stability analysis is the key to understanding locomotion and control of body equilibrium, with applications in numerous fields such as kinesiology, medicine, and robotics. In biomechanics, Center of Pressure (CoP) is used in studies of human postural control and gait. We propose and validate a novel approach to learn CoP from pose of a human body to aid stability analysis. More specifically, we propose an end-to-end deep learning architecture to regress foot pressure heatmaps, and hence the CoP locations, from 2D human pose derived from video. We have collected a set of long (5min +) cho…
We present a method for estimating pose information from a single depth image given an arbitrary kinematic structure without prior training. For an arbitrary skeleton and depth image, an evolutionary algorithm is used to find the optimal kinematic configuration to explain the observed image. Results show that our approach can correctly estimate poses of 39 and 78 degree-of-freedom models from a single depth image, even in cases of significant self-occlusion.
We propose a method for object-aware 3D egocentric pose estimation that tightly integrates kinematics modeling, dynamics modeling, and scene object information. Unlike prior kinematics or dynamics-based approaches where the two components are used disjointly, we synergize the two approaches via dynamics-regulated training. At each timestep, a kinematic model is used to provide a target pose using video evidence and simulation state. Then, a prelearned dynamics model attempts to mimic the kinematic pose in a physics simulator. By comparing the pose instructed by the kinematic model against the …
Montana State University-Bozeman（蒙大拿州立大学波兹曼分校）；General Intelligence Corporation（通用智能公司）
There is physiological evidence that our ability to interpret human pose and action from 2D visual imagery (binocular or monocular) engages the circuitry of the motor cortices as well as the visual areas of the brain. This implies that the capability of the motor cortices to solve inverse kinematics is flexible enough to apply to both motion planning as well as serving as a generative model for the visual processing of human figures, despite the differing functional requirements of the two tasks. This paper provides a computational model of the cooperation between visual and motor areas: in ot…
Existing deep models predict 2D and 3D kinematic poses from video that are approximately accurate, but contain visible errors that violate physical constraints, such as feet penetrating the ground and bodies leaning at extreme angles. In this paper, we present a physics-based method for inferring 3D human motion from video sequences that takes initial 2D and 3D pose estimates as input. We first estimate ground contact timings with a novel prediction network which is trained without hand-labeled data. A physics-based trajectory optimization then solves for a physically-plausible motion, based o…
