Detangling People: Individuating Multiple Close People and Their Body Parts via Region Assembly

Hao Jiang, Kristen Grauman; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017, pp. 6021-6029

Today's person detection methods work best when people are in common upright poses and appear reasonably well spaced out in the image. However, in many real images, that's not what people do. People often appear quite close to each other, e.g., with limbs linked or heads touching, and their poses are often not pedestrian-like. We propose an approach to detangle people in multi-person images. We formulate the task as a region assembly problem. Starting from a large set of overlapping regions from body part semantic segmentation and generic object proposals, our optimization approach reassembles those pieces together into multiple person instances. Since optimal region assembly is a challenging combinatorial problem, we present a Lagrangian relaxation method to accelerate the lower bound estimation, thereby enabling a fast branch and bound solution for the global optimum. As output, our method produces a pixel-level map indicating both 1) the body part labels (arm, leg, torso, and head), and 2) which parts belong to which individual person. Our results on challenging datasets show our method is robust to clutter, occlusion, and complex poses. It outperforms a variety of competing methods, including existing detector CRF methods and region CNN approaches. In addition, we demonstrate its impact on a proxemics recognition task, which demands a precise representation of "whose body part is where" in crowded images.