No Arabic abstract
Human pose estimation is a major computer vision problem with applications ranging from augmented reality and video capture to surveillance and movement tracking. In the medical context, the latter may be an important biomarker for neurological impairments in infants. Whilst many methods exist, their application has been limited by the need for well annotated large datasets and the inability to generalize to humans of different shapes and body compositions, e.g. children and infants. In this paper we present a novel method for learning pose estimators for human adults and infants in an unsupervised fashion. We approach this as a learnable template matching problem facilitated by deep feature extractors. Human-interpretable landmarks are estimated by transforming a template consisting of predefined body parts that are characterized by 2D Gaussian distributions. Enforcing a connectivity prior guides our model to meaningful human shape representations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on two different datasets including adults and infants.
Modern 3D human pose estimation techniques rely on deep networks, which require large amounts of training data. While weakly-supervised methods require less supervision, by utilizing 2D poses or multi-view imagery without annotations, they still need a sufficiently large set of samples with 3D annotations for learning to succeed. In this paper, we propose to overcome this problem by learning a geometry-aware body representation from multi-view images without annotations. To this end, we use an encoder-decoder that predicts an image from one viewpoint given an image from another viewpoint. Because this representation encodes 3D geometry, using it in a semi-supervised setting makes it easier to learn a mapping from it to 3D human pose. As evidenced by our experiments, our approach significantly outperforms fully-supervised methods given the same amount of labeled data, and improves over other semi-supervised methods while using as little as 1% of the labeled data.
The existing human pose estimation methods are confronted with inaccurate long-distance regression or high computational cost due to the complex learning objectives. This work proposes a novel deep learning framework for human pose estimation called composite localization to divide the complex learning objective into two simpler ones: a sparse heatmap to find the keypoints approximate location and two short-distance offsetmaps to obtain its final precise coordinates. To realize the framework, we construct two types of composite localization networks: CLNet-ResNet and CLNet-Hourglass. We evaluate the networks on three benchmark datasets, including the Leeds Sports Pose dataset, the MPII Human Pose dataset, and the COCO keypoints detection dataset. The experimental results show that our CLNet-ResNet50 outperforms SimpleBaseline by 1.14% with about 1/2 GFLOPs. Our CLNet-Hourglass outperforms the original stacked-hourglass by 4.45% on COCO.
Event camera is an emerging imaging sensor for capturing dynamics of moving objects as events, which motivates our work in estimating 3D human pose and shape from the event signals. Events, on the other hand, have their unique challenges: rather than capturing static body postures, the event signals are best at capturing local motions. This leads us to propose a two-stage deep learning approach, called EventHPE. The first-stage, FlowNet, is trained by unsupervised learning to infer optical flow from events. Both events and optical flow are closely related to human body dynamics, which are fed as input to the ShapeNet in the second stage, to estimate 3D human shapes. To mitigate the discrepancy between image-based flow (optical flow) and shape-based flow (vertices movement of human body shape), a novel flow coherence loss is introduced by exploiting the fact that both flows are originated from the identical human motion. An in-house event-based 3D human dataset is curated that comes with 3D pose and shape annotations, which is by far the largest one to our knowledge. Empirical evaluations on DHP19 dataset and our in-house dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
This paper focuses on a new problem of estimating human pose and shape from single polarization images. Polarization camera is known to be able to capture the polarization of reflected lights that preserves rich geometric cues of an object surface. Inspired by the recent applications in surface normal reconstruction from polarization images, in this paper, we attempt to estimate human pose and shape from single polarization images by leveraging the polarization-induced geometric cues. A dedicated two-stage pipeline is proposed: given a single polarization image, stage one (Polar2Normal) focuses on the fine detailed human body surface normal estimation; stage two (Polar2Shape) then reconstructs clothed human shape from the polarization image and the estimated surface normal. To empirically validate our approach, a dedicated dataset (PHSPD) is constructed, consisting of over 500K frames with accurate pose and shape annotations. Empirical evaluations on this real-world dataset as well as a synthetic dataset, SURREAL, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. It suggests polarization camera as a promising alternative to the more conventional RGB camera for human pose and shape estimation.
In the presence of annotated data, deep human pose estimation networks yield impressive performance. Nevertheless, annotating new data is extremely time-consuming, particularly in real-world conditions. Here, we address this by leveraging contrastive self-supervised (CSS) learning to extract rich latent vectors from single-view videos. Instead of simply treating the latent features of nearby frames as positive pairs and those of temporally-distant ones as negative pairs as in other CSS approaches, we explicitly disentangle each latent vector into a time-variant component and a time-invariant one. We then show that applying CSS only to the time-variant features, while also reconstructing the input and encouraging a gradual transition between nearby and away features, yields a rich latent space, well-suited for human pose estimation. Our approach outperforms other unsupervised single-view methods and matches the performance of multi-view techniques.