An Empirical Study of the Collapsing Problem in Semi-Supervised 2D Human Pose Estimation

Rongchang Xie, Chunyu Wang, Wenjun Zeng, Yizhou Wang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 11240-11249

Abstract


The state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning models are consistency-based which learn about unlabeled images by maximizing the similarity between different augmentations of an image. But when we apply the methods to human pose estimation which has extremely imbalanced class distribution, the models often collapse and predict every pixel in unlabeled images as background. This is because the decision boundary may pass through the high-density area of the minor class so more and more pixels are gradually mis-classified as the background class. In this work, we present a surprisingly simple approach to drive the model to learn in the correct direction. For each image, it composes a pair of easy and hard augmentations and uses the more accurate predictions on the easy image to teach the network to learn about the hard one. The accuracy superiority of teaching signals allows the network to be "monotonically" improved which effectively avoids collapsing. We apply our method to recent pose estimators and find that they achieve significantly better performances than their supervised counterparts on three public datasets.

Related Material


[pdf] [supp] [arXiv]
[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Xie_2021_ICCV, author = {Xie, Rongchang and Wang, Chunyu and Zeng, Wenjun and Wang, Yizhou}, title = {An Empirical Study of the Collapsing Problem in Semi-Supervised 2D Human Pose Estimation}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)}, month = {October}, year = {2021}, pages = {11240-11249} }