Adversarial PoseNet: A Structure-Aware Convolutional Network for Human Pose Estimation

Yu Chen, Chunhua Shen, Xiu-Shen Wei, Lingqiao Liu, Jian Yang; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017, pp. 1212-1221

For human pose estimation in monocular images, joint occlusions and overlapping upon human bodies often result in deviated pose predictions. Under these circumstances, bi- ologically implausible pose predictions may be produced. In contrast, human vision is able to predict poses by exploiting geometric constraints of joint inter-connectivity. To address the problem by incorporating priors about the structure of human bodies, we propose a novel structure-aware convo- lutional network to implicitly take such priors into account during training of the deep network. Explicit learning of such constraints is typically challenging. Instead, we design discriminators to distinguish the real poses from the fake ones (such as biologically implausible ones). If the pose generator (G) generates results that the discriminator fails to distinguish from real ones, the network successfully learns the priors. To better capture the structure dependency of human body joints, the generator G is designed in a stacked multi-task manner to predict poses as well as occlusion heatmaps. Then, the pose and occlusion heatmaps are sent to the discrimina- tors to predict the likelihood of the pose being real. Training of the network follows the strategy of conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The effectiveness of the pro- posed network is evaluated on two widely used human pose estimation benchmark datasets. Our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and almost always generates plausible human pose predictions.