Articulated Human Pose Estimation from Unconstrained Images and Videos

In this talk, I will present an overview of my Ph.D. research towards articulated human pose estimation from unconstrained images and videos. In the first part of the talk, I will present an approach to jointly model multi-person pose estimation and tracking in a single formulation. The approach represents body joint detections in a video by a spatiotemporal graph and solves an integer linear program to partition the graph into sub-graphs that correspond to plausible body pose trajectories for each person. I will also introduce the PoseTrack dataset and benchmark which is now the de-facto standard for multi-person pose estimation and tracking. In the second half of the talk, I will present a new method for 3D pose estimation from a monocular image through a novel 2.5D pose representation. The new 2.5D representation can be reliably estimated from an RGB image. Furthermore, it allows to exactly reconstruct the absolute 3D body pose up to a scaling factor, which can be estimated additionally if a prior of the body size is given. I will also describe a novel CNN architecture to implicitly learn the heatmaps and depth-maps for human body key-points from a single RGB image.