Real-Time Articulated Hand Pose Estimation Using Semi-supervised Transductive Regression Forests

Danhang Tang, Tsz-Ho Yu, Tae-Kyun Kim; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013, pp. 3224-3231

This paper presents the first semi-supervised transductive algorithm for real-time articulated hand pose estimation. Noisy data and occlusions are the major challenges of articulated hand pose estimation. In addition, the discrepancies among realistic and synthetic pose data undermine the performances of existing approaches that use synthetic data extensively in training. We therefore propose the Semi-supervised Transductive Regression (STR) forest which learns the relationship between a small, sparsely labelled realistic dataset and a large synthetic dataset. We also design a novel data-driven, pseudo-kinematic technique to refine noisy or occluded joints. Our contributions include: (i) capturing the benefits of both realistic and synthetic data via transductive learning; (ii) showing accuracies can be improved by considering unlabelled data; and (iii) introducing a pseudo-kinematic technique to refine articulations efficiently. Experimental results show not only the promising performance of our method with respect to noise and occlusions, but also its superiority over state-ofthe-arts in accuracy, robustness and speed.