Mushroom Detection and Three Dimensional Pose Estimation from Multi-View Point Clouds

Weakly-supervised pre-training for 3D human pose estimation via perspective knowledge

Convolutional Neural Network based approaches for monocular 3D human pose estimation usually require a large amount of training images with 3D pose annotations. While it is feasible to provide 2D joint annotations for large corpora of in-the-wild images with humans, providing accurate 3D annotations to such in-the-wild corpora is hardly feasible in practice. Most existing 3D labelled data sets are either synthetically created or feature in-studio images. 3D pose estimation algorithms trained on such data often have limited ability to generalize to real world scene diversity. We therefore propose a new deep learning based method for monocular 3D human pose estimation that shows high accuracy and generalizes better to in-the-wild scenes. It has a network architecture that comprises a new disentangled hidden space encoding of explicit 2D and 3D features, and uses supervision by a new learned projection model from predicted 3D pose. Our algorithm can be jointly trained on image data with 3D labels and image data with only 2D labels. It achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on challenging in-the-wild data.

This paper addresses the problem of 3D human pose estimation in the wild. A significant challenge is the lack of training data, i.e., 2D images of humans annotated with 3D poses. Such data is necessary to train state-of-the-art CNN architectures. Here, we propose a solution to generate a large set of photorealistic synthetic images of humans with 3D pose annotations. We introduce an image-based synthesis engine that artificially augments a dataset of real images with 2D human pose annotations using 3D motion capture data. Given a candidate 3D pose, our algorithm selects for each joint an image whose 2D pose locally matches the projected 3D pose. The selected images are then combined to generate a new synthetic image by stitching local image patches in a kinematically constrained manner. The resulting images are used to train an end-to-end CNN for full-body 3D pose estimation. We cluster the training data into a large number of pose classes and tackle pose estimation as a K-way classification problem. Such an approach is viable only with large training sets such as ours. Our method outperforms most of the published works in terms of 3D pose estimation in controlled environments (Human3.6M) and shows promising results for real-world images (LSP). This demonstrates that CNNs trained on artificial images generalize well to real images. Compared to data generated from more classical rendering engines, our synthetic images do not require any domain adaptation or fine-tuning stage.

Recently, remarkable advances have been achieved in 3D human pose estimation from monocular images because of the powerful Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs). Despite their success on large-scale datasets collected in the constrained lab environment, it is difficult to obtain the 3D pose annotations for in-the-wild images. Therefore, 3D human pose estimation in the wild is still a challenge. In this paper, we propose an adversarial learning framework, which distills the 3D human pose structures learned from the fully annotated dataset to in-the-wild images with only 2D pose annotations. Instead of defining hard-coded rules to constrain the pose estimation results, we design a novel multi-source discriminator to distinguish the predicted 3D poses from the ground-truth, which helps to enforce the pose estimator to generate anthropometrically valid poses even with images in the wild. We also observe that a carefully designed information source for the discriminator is essential to boost the performance. Thus, we design a geometric descriptor, which computes the pairwise relative locations and distances between body joints, as a new information source for the discriminator. The efficacy of our adversarial learning framework with the new geometric descriptor has been demonstrated through extensive experiments on widely used public benchmarks. Our approach significantly improves the performance compared with previous state-of-the-art approaches.

To improve the generalization of 3D human pose estimators, many existing deep learning based models focus on adding different augmentations to training poses. However, data augmentation techniques are limited to the "seen" pose combinations and hard to infer poses with rare "unseen" joint positions. To address this problem, we present CameraPose, a weakly-supervised framework for 3D human pose estimation from a single image, which can not only be applied on 2D-3D pose pairs but also on 2D alone annotations. By adding a camera parameter branch, any in-the-wild 2D annotations can be fed into our pipeline to boost the training diversity and the 3D poses can be implicitly learned by reprojecting back to 2D. Moreover, CameraPose introduces a refinement network module with confidence-guided loss to further improve the quality of noisy 2D keypoints extracted by 2D pose estimators. Experimental results demonstrate that the CameraPose brings in clear improvements on cross-scenario datasets. Notably, it outperforms the baseline method by 3mm on the most challenging dataset 3DPW. In addition, by combining our proposed refinement network module with existing 3D pose estimators, their performance can be improved in cross-scenario evaluation.

A self-supervised spatio-temporal attention network for video-based 3D infant pose estimation

We propose a deep convolutional neural network for 3D human pose and camera estimation from monocular images that learns from 2D joint annotations. The proposed network follows the typical architecture, but contains an additional output layer which projects predicted 3D joints onto 2D, and enforces constraints on body part lengths in 3D. We further enforce pose constraints using an independently trained network that learns a prior distribution over 3D poses. We evaluate our approach on several benchmark datasets and compare against state-of-the-art approaches for 3D human pose estimation, achieving comparable performance. Additionally, we show that our approach significantly outperforms other methods in cases where 3D ground truth data is unavailable, and that our network exhibits good generalization properties.

3D object detection and pose estimation has been studied extensively in recent decades for its potential applications in robotics. However, there still remains challenges when we aim at detecting multiple objects while retaining low false positive rate in cluttered environments. This paper proposes a robust 3D object detection and pose estimation pipeline based on RGB-D images, which can detect multiple objects simultaneously while reducing false positives. Detection begins with template matching and yields a set of template matches. A clustering algorithm then groups templates of similar spatial location and produces multiple-object hypotheses. A scoring function evaluates the hypotheses using their associated templates and non-maximum suppression is adopted to remove duplicate results based on the scores. Finally, a combination of point cloud processing algorithms are used to compute objects' 3D poses. Existing object hypotheses are verified by computing the overlap between model and scene points. Experiments demonstrate that our approach provides competitive results comparable to the state-of-the-arts and can be applied to robot random bin-picking.

We present a deployment friendly, fast bottom-up framework for multi-person 3D human pose estimation. We adopt a novel neural representation of multi-person 3D pose which unifies the position of person instances with their corresponding 3D pose representation. This is realized by learning a generative pose embedding which not only ensures plausible 3D pose predictions, but also eliminates the usual keypoint grouping operation as employed in prior bottom-up approaches. Further, we propose a practical deployment paradigm where paired 2D or 3D pose annotations are unavailable. In the absence of any paired supervision, we leverage a frozen network, as a teacher model, which is trained on an auxiliary task of multi-person 2D pose estimation. We cast the learning as a cross-modal alignment problem and propose training objectives to realize a shared latent space between two diverse modalities. We aim to enhance the model’s ability to perform beyond the limiting teacher network by enriching the latent-to-3D pose mapping using artificially synthesized multi-person 3D scene samples. Our approach not only generalizes to in-the-wild images, but also yields a superior trade-off between speed and performance, compared to prior top-down approaches. Our approach also yields state-of-the-art multi-person 3D pose estimation performance among the bottom-up approaches under consistent supervision levels.

Recovering 3D human pose from 2D joints is still a challenging problem, especially without any 3D annotation, video information, or multi-view information. In this paper, we present an unsupervised GAN-based model consisting of multiple weight-sharing generators to estimate a 3D human pose from a single image without 3D annotations. In our model, we introduce single-view-multi-angle consistency (SVMAC) to significantly improve the estimation performance. With 2Djoint locations as input, our model estimates a 3D pose and a camera simultaneously. During training, the estimated 3D pose is rotated by random angles and the estimated camera projects the rotated 3D poses back to 2D. The 2D reprojections will be fed into weight-sharing generators to estimate the corresponding 3D poses and cameras, which are then mixed to impose SVMAC constraints to self-supervise the training process. The experimental results show that our method outpetforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised methods on Human 3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP. Moreover, qualitative results on MPII and LSP show that our method can generalize well to unknown data.

3D human pose estimation aims to reconstruct the human skeleton of all the individuals in a scene by detecting several body joints. The creation of accurate and efficient methods is required for several real-world applications including animation, human–robot interaction, surveillance systems or sports, among many others. However, several obstacles such as occlusions, random camera perspectives, or the scarcity of 3D labelled data, have been hampering the models’ performance and limiting their deployment in real-world scenarios. The higher availability of cameras has led researchers to explore multi-view solutions due to the advantage of being able to exploit different perspectives to reconstruct the pose. Most existing reviews focus mainly on monocular 3D human pose estimation and a comprehensive survey only on multi-view approaches to determine the 3D pose has been missing since 2012. Thus, the goal of this survey is to fill that gap and present an overview of the methodologies related to 3D pose estimation in multi-view settings, understand what were the strategies found to address the various challenges and also, identify their limitations. According to the reviewed articles, it was possible to find that most methods are fully-supervised approaches based on geometric constraints. Nonetheless, most of the methods suffer from 2D pose mismatches, to which the incorporation of temporal consistency and depth information have been suggested to reduce the impact of this limitation, besides working directly with 3D features can completely surpass this problem but at the expense of higher computational complexity. Models with lower supervision levels were identified to overcome some of the issues related to 3D pose, particularly the scarcity of labelled datasets. Therefore, no method is yet capable of solving all the challenges associated with the reconstruction of the 3D pose. Due to the existing trade-off between complexity and performance, the best method depends on the application scenario. Therefore, further research is still required to develop an approach capable of quickly inferring a highly accurate 3D pose with bearable computation cost. To this goal, techniques such as active learning, methods that learn with a low level of supervision, the incorporation of temporal consistency, view selection, estimation of depth information and multi-modal approaches might be interesting strategies to keep in mind when developing a new methodology to solve this task. • First review only on multi-view, multi-modal methods to estimate 3D pose since 2012. • Multi-view allows capturing the full body geometry, making 3D pose estimation easier. • Real-world applications include sports, broadcasting, rehabilitation or animation. • Finding a fast, accurate method with low computational cost remains a challenge. • Multi-modal methods or view selection can lead to an efficient and effective model.

Adversarial learning for viewpoints invariant 3D human pose estimation

3D hand pose and shape estimation from RGB images for keypoint-based hand gesture recognition

Estimating 3D hand pose directly from RGB images is challenging but has gained steady progress recently by training deep models with annotated 3D poses. However annotating 3D poses is difficult and as such only a few 3D hand pose datasets are available, all with limited sample sizes. In this study, we propose a new framework of training 3D pose estimation models from RGB images without using explicit 3D annotations, i.e., trained with only 2D information. Our framework is motivated by two observations: 1) Videos provide richer information for estimating 3D poses as opposed to static images; 2) Estimated 3D poses ought to be consistent whether the videos are viewed in the forward order or reverse order. We leverage these two observations to develop a self-supervised learning model called temporal-aware self-supervised network (TASSN). By enforcing temporal consistency constraints, TASSN learns 3D hand poses and meshes from videos with only 2D keypoint position annotations. Experiments show that our model achieves surprisingly good results, with 3D estimation accuracy on par with the state-of-the-art models trained with 3D annotations, highlighting the benefit of the temporal consistency in constraining 3D prediction models.

The recent success of neural networks has significantly advanced the performance of 3D human pose estimation from 2D input images. However, the diversity of capturing viewpoints and the flexibility of the human poses remain some significant challenges. In this paper, we propose a view-invariant 3D human pose estimation module to alleviate the effects of viewpoint diversity. The proposed framework consists of a base network, which provides an initial estimation of a 3D pose, a view-invariant hierarchical correction network (VI-HC) on top of that to learn the 3D pose refinement under consistent views, and a view-invariant discriminative network (VID) to enforce high-level constraints over body configurations. In VI-HC, the initial 3D pose inputs are automatically transformed to consistent views for further refinements at the global body and local body parts level, respectively. For the VID, under consistent viewpoints, we use adversarial learning to differentiate between estimated 3D poses and real 3D poses to avoid implausible results. The experimental results demonstrate that the constraint on viewpoint consistency can dramatically enhance the performance of 3D human pose estimation. Our module shows robustness for different 3D pose base networks and achieves a significant improvement (about 9%) over a powerful baseline on the public 3D pose estimation benchmark Human3.6M.