Towards Accurate Multi-person Pose Estimation in the Wild

We propose a method for multi-person detection and 2-D keypoint localization (human pose estimation) that achieves state-of-the-art results on the challenging COCO keypoints task. It is a simple, yet powerful, top-down approach consisting of two stages. In the first stage, we predict the location and scale of boxes which are likely to contain people; for this we use the Faster RCNN detector with an Inception-ResNet architecture. In the second stage, we estimate the keypoints of the person potentially contained in each proposed bounding box. For each keypoint type we predict dense heatmaps and offsets using a fully convolutional ResNet. To combine these outputs we introduce a novel aggregation procedure to obtain highly localized keypoint predictions. We also use a novel form of keypoint-based Non-Maximum-Suppression (NMS), instead of the cruder box-level NMS, and a novel form of keypoint-based confidence score estimation, instead of box-level scoring. Our final system achieves average precision of 0.636 on the COCO test-dev set and the 0.628 test-standard sets, outperforming the CMU-Pose winner of the 2016 COCO keypoints challenge. Further, by using additional labeled data we obtain an even higher average precision of 0.668 on the test-dev set and 0.658 on the test-standard set, thus achieving a roughly 10% improvement over the previous best performing method on the same challenge.

• Machine Perception