From Pictorial Structures to deformable structures

Pictorial Structures (PS) define a probabilistic model of 2D articulated objects in images. Typical PS models assume an object can be represented by a set of rigid parts connected with pairwise constraints that define the prior probability of part configurations. These models are widely used to represent non-rigid articulated objects such as humans and animals despite the fact that such objects have parts that deform non-rigidly. Here we define a new Deformable Structures (DS) model that is a natural extension of previous PS models and that captures the non-rigid shape deformation of the parts. Each part in a DS model is represented by a low-dimensional shape deformation space and pairwise potentials between parts capture how the shape varies with pose and the shape of neighboring parts. A key advantage of such a model is that it more accurately models object boundaries. This enables image likelihood models that are more discriminative than previous PS likelihoods. This likelihood...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: CVPR
• Authors: Silvia Zuffi, Oren Freifeld, Michael J. Black
• Keywords: Belief Propagation, Computer Vision, Cvpr 2012, Likelihood Models, Shape Deformation