We propose a simple yet reliable bottom-up approach with a good trade-off between accuracy and efficiency for the problem of multi-person pose estimation. Given an image, we employ an Hourglass Network to infer all the keypoints from different persons indiscriminately as well as the guiding offsets connecting the adjacent keypoints belonging to the same persons. Then, we greedily group the candidate keypoints into multiple human poses (if any), utilizing the predicted guiding offsets. And we refer to this process as greedy offset-guided keypoint grouping (GOG). Moreover, we revisit the encoding-decoding method for the multi-person keypoint coordinates and reveal some important facts affecting accuracy. Experiments have demonstrated the obvious performance improvements brought by the introduced components. Our approach is comparable to the state of the art on the challenging COCO dataset under fair conditions. The source code and our pre-trained model are publicly available online.
Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod（罗巴切夫斯基下诺夫哥罗德国立大学）；National Research University Higher School of Economics（高等经济研究大学）；Huawei Research Center（华为研究中心）
The success of deep neural networks in the traditional keypoint detection task encourages researchers to solve new problems and collect more complex datasets. The size of the DeepFashion2 dataset poses a new challenge on the keypoint detection task, as it comprises 13 clothing categories that span a wide range of keypoints (294 in total). The direct prediction of all keypoints leads to huge memory consumption, slow training, and a slow inference time. This paper studies the keypoint grouping approach and how it affects the performance of the CenterNet architecture. We propose a simple and effi…
The typical bottom-up human pose estimation framework includes two stages, keypoint detection and grouping. Most existing works focus on developing grouping algorithms, e.g., associative embedding, and pixel-wise keypoint regression that we adopt in our approach. We present several schemes that are rarely or unthoroughly studied before for improving keypoint detection and grouping (keypoint regression) performance. First, we exploit the keypoint heatmaps for pixel-wise keypoint regression instead of separating them for improving keypoint regression. Second, we adopt a pixel-wise spatial transf…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Microsoft（微软）
In this paper, we are interested in the bottom-up paradigm of estimating human poses from an image. We study the dense keypoint regression framework that is previously inferior to the keypoint detection and grouping framework. Our motivation is that regressing keypoint positions accurately needs to learn representations that focus on the keypoint regions. We present a simple yet effective approach, named disentangled keypoint regression (DEKR). We adopt adaptive convolutions through pixel-wise spatial transformer to activate the pixels in the keypoint regions and accordingly learn representati…
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 ke…
This paper presents a new method to solve keypoint detection and instance association by using Transformer. For bottom-up multi-person pose estimation models, they need to detect keypoints and learn associative information between keypoints. We argue that these problems can be entirely solved by Transformer. Specifically, the self-attention in Transformer measures dependencies between any pair of locations, which can provide association information for keypoints grouping. However, the naive attention patterns are still not subjectively controlled, so there is no guarantee that the keypoints wi…
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；Nanjing University（南京大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
Multi-person pose estimation is challenging because it localizes body keypoints for multiple persons simultaneously. Previous methods can be divided into two streams, i.e. top-down and bottom-up methods. The top-down methods localize keypoints after human detection, while the bottom-up methods localize keypoints directly and then cluster/group them for different persons, which are generally more efficient than top-down methods. However, in existing bottom-up methods, the keypoint grouping is usually solved independently from keypoint detection, making them not end-to-end trainable and have sub…
We introduce CenterGroup, an attention-based framework to estimate human poses from a set of identity-agnostic keypoints and person center predictions in an image. Our approach uses a transformer to obtain context-aware embeddings for all detected keypoints and centers and then applies multi-head attention to directly group joints into their corresponding person centers. While most bottom-up methods rely on non-learnable clustering at inference, CenterGroup uses a fully differentiable attention mechanism that we train end-to-end together with our keypoint detector. As a result, our method obta…
We propose the first direct end-to-end multi-person pose estimation framework, termed DirectPose. Inspired by recent anchor-free object detectors, which directly regress the two corners of target bounding-boxes, the proposed framework directly predicts instance-aware keypoints for all the instances from a raw input image, eliminating the need for heuristic grouping in bottom-up methods or bounding-box detection and RoI operations in top-down ones. We also propose a novel Keypoint Alignment (KPAlign) mechanism, which overcomes the main difficulty: lack of the alignment between the convolutional…
Bottom-up approaches for image-based multi-person pose estimation consist of two stages: (1) keypoint detection and (2) grouping of the detected keypoints to form person instances. Current grouping approaches rely on learned embedding from only visual features that completely ignore the spatial configuration of human poses. In this work, we formulate the grouping task as a graph partitioning problem, where we learn the affinity matrix with a Graph Neural Network (GNN). More specifically, we design a Geometry-aware Association GNN that utilizes spatial information of the keypoints and learns lo…
Human pose-estimation in a multi-person image involves detection of various body parts and grouping them into individual person clusters. While the former task is challenging due to mutual occlusions, the combinatorial complexity of the latter task is very high. We propose a greedy part assignment algorithm that exploits the inherent structure of the human body to achieve a lower complexity, compared to any of the prior published works. This is accomplished by (i) reducing the number of part-candidates using the estimated number of people in the image, (ii) doing a greedy sequential assignment…
Universal lesion detection in computed tomography (CT) images is an important yet challenging task due to the large variations in lesion type, size, shape, and appearance. Considering that data in clinical routine (such as the DeepLesion dataset) are usually annotated with a long and a short diameter according to the standard of Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors (RECIST) diameters, we propose RECIST-Net, a new approach to lesion detection in which the four extreme points and center point of the RECIST diameters are detected. By detecting a lesion as keypoints, we provide a more conc…
We introduce YOLO-pose, a novel heatmap-free approach for joint detection, and 2D multi-person pose estimation in an image based on the popular YOLO object detection framework. Existing heatmap based two-stage approaches are sub-optimal as they are not end-to-end trainable and training relies on a surrogate L1 loss that is not equivalent to maximizing the evaluation metric, i.e. Object Keypoint Similarity (OKS). Our framework allows us to train the model end-to-end and optimize the OKS metric itself. The proposed model learns to jointly detect bounding boxes for multiple persons and their corr…
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
To address the challenging task of instance-aware human part parsing, a new bottom-up regime is proposed to learn category-level human semantic segmentation as well as multi-person pose estimation in a joint and end-to-end manner. It is a compact, efficient and powerful framework that exploits structural information over different human granularities and eases the difficulty of person partitioning. Specifically, a dense-to-sparse projection field, which allows explicitly associating dense human semantics with sparse keypoints, is learnt and progressively improved over the network feature pyram…
SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；SenseTime Computer Vision Research Group（商汤科技计算机视觉研究组）
We propose a unified framework for multi-person pose estimation and tracking. Our framework consists of two main components,~\ie~SpatialNet and TemporalNet. The SpatialNet accomplishes body part detection and part-level data association in a single frame, while the TemporalNet groups human instances in consecutive frames into trajectories. Specifically, besides body part detection heatmaps, SpatialNet also predicts the Keypoint Embedding (KE) and Spatial Instance Embedding (SIE) for body part association. We model the grouping procedure into a differentiable Pose-Guided Grouping (PGG) module t…
Understanding interactions between humans and objects is one of the fundamental problems in visual classification and an essential step towards detailed scene understanding. Human-object interaction (HOI) detection strives to localize both the human and an object as well as the identification of complex interactions between them. Most existing HOI detection approaches are instance-centric where interactions between all possible human-object pairs are predicted based on appearance features and coarse spatial information. We argue that appearance features alone are insufficient to capture comple…
Video Analytics Lab, Indian Institute of Science（印度科学理工学院视频分析实验室）
We present a deployment friendly, fast bottom-up framework for multi-person 3D human pose estimation. We adopt a novel neural representation of multi-person 3D pose which unifies the position of person instances with their corresponding 3D pose representation. This is realized by learning a generative pose embedding which not only ensures plausible 3D pose predictions, but also eliminates the usual keypoint grouping operation as employed in prior bottom-up approaches. Further, we propose a practical deployment paradigm where paired 2D or 3D pose annotations are unavailable. In the absence of a…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Zhejiang Sci-Tech University（浙江理工大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）
We rethink a well-know bottom-up approach for multi-person pose estimation and propose an improved one. The improved approach surpasses the baseline significantly thanks to (1) an intuitional yet more sensible representation, which we refer to as body parts to encode the connection information between keypoints, (2) an improved stacked hourglass network with attention mechanisms, (3) a novel focal L2 loss which is dedicated to hard keypoint and keypoint association (body part) mining, and (4) a robust greedy keypoint assignment algorithm for grouping the detected keypoints into individual pose…
The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）
We propose a fully convolutional multi-person pose estimation framework using dynamic instance-aware convolutions, termed FCPose. Different from existing methods, which often require ROI (Region of Interest) operations and/or grouping post-processing, FCPose eliminates the ROIs and grouping post-processing with dynamic instance-aware keypoint estimation heads. The dynamic keypoint heads are conditioned on each instance (person), and can encode the instance concept in the dynamically-generated weights of their filters. Moreover, with the strong representation capacity of dynamic convolutions, t…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Existing methods of multiple human parsing usually adopt a two-stage strategy (typically top-down and bottom-up), which suffers from either strong dependence on prior detection or highly computational redundancy during post-grouping. In this work, we present an end-to-end multiple human parsing framework using representative parts, termed RepParser. Different from mainstream methods, RepParser solves the multiple human parsing in a new single-stage manner without resorting to person detection or post-grouping.To this end, RepParser decouples the parsing pipeline into instance-aware kernel gene…
Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院沈阳自动化研究所）；Institutes for Robotics and Intelligent Manufacturing, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院机器人与智能制造创新研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
In recent years, estimating the 6D pose of object instances with convolutional neural network (CNN) has received considerable attention. Depending on whether intermediate cues are used, the relevant literature can be roughly divided into two broad categories: direct methods and two stage pipelines. For the latter, intermediate cues, such as 3D object coordinates, semantic keypoints, or virtual control points instead of pose parameters are regressed by CNN in the first stage. Object pose can then be solved by correspondence constraints constructed with these intermediate cues. In this paper, we…
JD Finance America Corporation（京东金融美国公司）；University of Missouri（密苏里大学）
Pig counting is a crucial task for large-scale pig farming, which is usually completed by human visually. But this process is very time-consuming and error-prone. Few studies in literature developed automated pig counting method. Existing methods only focused on pig counting using single image, and its accuracy is challenged by several factors, including pig movements, occlusion and overlapping. Especially, the field of view of a single image is very limited, and could not meet the requirements of pig counting for large pig grouping houses. To that end, we presented a real-time automated pig c…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；OPPO Research Institute（OPPO研究院）；ByteDance Inc.（字节跳动公司）；Sea AI Lab（Sea人工智能实验室）；Institute of North Electronic Equipment（北方电子设备研究所）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Multi-person pose estimation generally follows top-down and bottom-up paradigms. Both of them use an extra stage ($\boldsymbol{e.g.,}$ human detection in top-down paradigm or grouping process in bottom-up paradigm) to build the relationship between the human instance and corresponding keypoints, thus leading to the high computation cost and redundant two-stage pipeline. To address the above issue, we propose to represent the human parts as adaptive points and introduce a fine-grained body representation method. The novel body representation is able to sufficiently encode the diverse pose infor…
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 …
Yingcai Honors College, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学英才学院）；School of Aerospace Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学宇航学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Donghua University（东华大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学自动控制与系统工程系）
Multi-person pose estimation is a fundamental and challenging problem to many computer vision tasks. Most existing methods can be broadly categorized into two classes: top-down and bottom-up methods. Both of the two types of methods involve two stages, namely, person detection and joints detection. Conventionally, the two stages are implemented separately without considering their interactions between them, and this may inevitably cause some issue intrinsically. In this paper, we present a novel method to simplify the pipeline by implementing person detection and joints detection simultaneousl…
UC San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）；Binghamton Univeristy, SUNY（纽约州立大学宾汉姆顿大学）
Multi-task learning aims to improve generalization performance of multiple prediction tasks by appropriately sharing relevant information across them. In the context of deep neural networks, this idea is often realized by hand-designed network architectures with layers that are shared across tasks and branches that encode task-specific features. However, the space of possible multi-task deep architectures is combinatorially large and often the final architecture is arrived at by manual exploration of this space subject to designer's bias, which can be both error-prone and tedious. In this work…
