Measure Locally, Reason Globally: Occlusion-sensitive Articulated Pose Estimation

Part-based tree-structured models have been widely used for 2D articulated human pose-estimation. These approaches admit efficient inference algorithms while capturing the important kinematic constraints of the human body as a graphical model. These methods often fail however when multiple body parts fit the same image region resulting in global pose estimates that poorly explain the overall image evidence. Attempts to solve this problem have focused on the use of strong prior models that are limited to learned activities such as walking. We argue that the problem actually lies with the image observations and not with the prior. In particular, image evidence for each body part is estimated independently of other parts without regard to self-occlusion. To address this we introduce occlusion-sensitive local likelihoods that approximate the global image likelihood using per-pixel hidden binary variables that encode the occlusion relationships between parts. This occlusion reasoning int...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: CVPR
• Authors: Leonid Sigal, Michael J. Black
• Keywords: Body Parts, Computer Vision, CVPR 2006, Image Evidence, Multiple Body Parts