Convolutional Pose Machines

Shih-En Wei, Varun Ramakrishna, Takeo Kanade, Yaser Sheikh; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016, pp. 4724-4732

Abstract


Pose Machines provide a sequential prediction framework for learning rich implicit spatial models. In this work we show a systematic design for how convolutional networks can be incorporated into the pose machine framework for learning image features and image-dependent spatial models for the task of pose estimation. The contribution of this paper is to implicitly model long-range dependencies between variables in structured prediction tasks such as articulated pose estimation. We achieve this by designing a sequential architecture composed of convolutional networks that directly operate on belief maps from previous stages, producing increasingly refined estimates for part locations, without the need for explicit graphical model-style inference. Our approach addresses the characteristic difficulty of vanishing gradients during training by providing a natural learning objective function that enforces intermediate supervision, thereby replenishing back-propagated gradients and conditioning the learning procedure. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and outperform competing methods on standard benchmarks including the MPII, LSP, and FLIC datasets.

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[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Wei_2016_CVPR,
author = {Wei, Shih-En and Ramakrishna, Varun and Kanade, Takeo and Sheikh, Yaser},
title = {Convolutional Pose Machines},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
month = {June},
year = {2016}
}