Automatic estimation of 3D human pose from monocular RGB images is a challenging and unsolved problem in computer vision. In a supervised manner, approaches heavily rely on laborious annotations and present hampered generalization ability due to the limited diversity of 3D pose datasets. To address these challenges, we propose a unified framework that leverages mask as supervision for unsupervised 3D pose estimation. With general unsupervised segmentation algorithms, the proposed model employs skeleton and physique representations that exploit accurate pose information from coarse to fine. Compared with previous unsupervised approaches, we organize the human skeleton in a fully unsupervised way which enables the processing of annotation-free data and provides ready-to-use estimation results. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate our state-of-the-art pose estimation performance on Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP datasets. Further experiments on in-the-wild datasets also illustrate the capability to access more data to boost our model. Code will be available at https://github.com/Charrrrrlie/Mask-as-Supervision.
We present LInKs, a novel unsupervised learning method to recover 3D human poses from 2D kinematic skeletons obtained from a single image, even when occlusions are present. Our approach follows a unique two-step process, which involves first lifting the occluded 2D pose to the 3D domain, followed by filling in the occluded parts using the partially reconstructed 3D coordinates. This lift-then-fill approach leads to significantly more accurate results compared to models that complete the pose in 2D space alone. Additionally, we improve the stability and likelihood estimation of normalising flows through a custom sampling function replacing PCA dimensionality reduction previously used in prior work. Furthermore, we are the first to investigate if different parts of the 2D kinematic skeleton can be lifted independently which we find by itself reduces the error of current lifting approaches. We attribute this to the reduction of long-range keypoint correlations. In our detailed evaluation, we quantify the error under various realistic occlusion scenarios, showcasing the versatility and applicability of our model. Our results consistently demonstrate the superiority of handling all types of occlusions in 3D space when compared to others that complete the pose in 2D space. Our approach also exhibits consistent accuracy in scenarios without occlusion, as evidenced by a 7.9% reduction in reconstruction error compared to prior works on the Human3.6M dataset. Furthermore, our method excels in accurately retrieving complete 3D poses even in the presence of occlusions, making it highly applicable in situations where complete 2D pose information is unavailable.
Analyzing and training 3D body posture models depend heavily on the availability of joint labels that are commonly acquired through laborious manual annotation of body joints or via marker-based joint localization using carefully curated markers and capturing systems. However, such annotations are not always available, especially for people performing unusual activities. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that learns to discover 3D keypoints on human bodies from multiple-view images without any supervision or labels other than the constraints multiple-view geometry provides. To ensure that the discovered 3D keypoints are meaningful, they are re-projected to each view to estimate the person's mask that the model itself has initially estimated without supervision. Our approach discovers more interpretable and accurate 3D keypoints compared to other state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches on Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP benchmark datasets.
Top-down methods dominate the field of 3D human pose and shape estimation, because they are decoupled from human detection and allow researchers to focus on the core problem. However, cropping, their first step, discards the location information from the very beginning, which makes themselves unable to accurately predict the global rotation in the original camera coordinate system. To address this problem, we propose to Carry Location Information in Full Frames (CLIFF) into this task. Specifically, we feed more holistic features to CLIFF by concatenating the cropped-image feature with its bounding box information. We calculate the 2D reprojection loss with a broader view of the full frame, taking a projection process similar to that of the person projected in the image. Fed and supervised by global-location-aware information, CLIFF directly predicts the global rotation along with more accurate articulated poses. Besides, we propose a pseudo-ground-truth annotator based on CLIFF, which provides high-quality 3D annotations for in-the-wild 2D datasets and offers crucial full supervision for regression-based methods. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks show that CLIFF outperforms prior arts by a significant margin, and reaches the first place on the AGORA leaderboard (the SMPL-Algorithms track). The code and data are available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/noah-research/tree/master/CLIFF.
Although significant progress has been achieved on monocular maker-less human motion capture in recent years, it is still hard for state-of-the-art methods to obtain satisfactory results in occlusion scenarios. There are two main reasons: the one is that the occluded motion capture is inherently ambiguous as various 3D poses can map to the same 2D observations, which always results in an unreliable estimation. The other is that no sufficient occluded human data can be used for training a robust model. To address the obstacles, our key-idea is to employ non-occluded human data to learn a joint-level spatial-temporal motion prior for occluded human with a self-supervised strategy. To further reduce the gap between synthetic and real occlusion data, we build the first 3D occluded motion dataset~(OcMotion), which can be used for both training and testing. We encode the motions in 2D maps and synthesize occlusions on non-occluded data for the self-supervised training. A spatial-temporal layer is then designed to learn joint-level correlations. The learned prior reduces the ambiguities of occlusions and is robust to diverse occlusion types, which is then adopted to assist the occluded human motion capture. Experimental results show that our method can generate accurate and coherent human motions from occluded videos with good generalization ability and runtime efficiency. The dataset and code are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/boycehbz/CHOMP}.
Available 3D human pose estimation approaches leverage different forms of strong (2D/3D pose) or weak (multi-view or depth) paired supervision. Barring synthetic or in-studio domains, acquiring such supervision for each new target environment is highly inconvenient. To this end, we cast 3D pose learning as a self-supervised adaptation problem that aims to transfer the task knowledge from a labeled source domain to a completely unpaired target. We propose to infer image-to-pose via two explicit mappings viz. image-to-latent and latent-to-pose where the latter is a pre-learned decoder obtained from a prior-enforcing generative adversarial auto-encoder. Next, we introduce relation distillation as a means to align the unpaired cross-modal samples i.e. the unpaired target videos and unpaired 3D pose sequences. To this end, we propose a new set of non-local relations in order to characterize long-range latent pose interactions unlike general contrastive relations where positive couplings are limited to a local neighborhood structure. Further, we provide an objective way to quantify non-localness in order to select the most effective relation set. We evaluate different self-adaptation settings and demonstrate state-of-the-art 3D human pose estimation performance on standard benchmarks.
The advances in monocular 3D human pose estimation are dominated by supervised techniques that require large-scale 2D/3D pose annotations. Such methods often behave erratically in the absence of any provision to discard unfamiliar out-of-distribution data. To this end, we cast the 3D human pose learning as an unsupervised domain adaptation problem. We introduce MRP-Net that constitutes a common deep network backbone with two output heads subscribing to two diverse configurations; a) model-free joint localization and b) model-based parametric regression. Such a design allows us to derive suitable measures to quantify prediction uncertainty at both pose and joint level granularity. While supervising only on labeled synthetic samples, the adaptation process aims to minimize the uncertainty for the unlabeled target images while maximizing the same for an extreme out-of-distribution dataset (backgrounds). Alongside synthetic-to-real 3D pose adaptation, the joint-uncertainties allow expanding the adaptation to work on in-the-wild images even in the presence of occlusion and truncation scenarios. We present a comprehensive evaluation of the proposed approach and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets.
Human pose estimation from single images is a challenging problem that is typically solved by supervised learning. Unfortunately, labeled training data does not yet exist for many human activities since 3D annotation requires dedicated motion capture systems. Therefore, we propose an unsupervised approach that learns to predict a 3D human pose from a single image while only being trained with 2D pose data, which can be crowd-sourced and is already widely available. To this end, we estimate the 3D pose that is most likely over random projections, with the likelihood estimated using normalizing flows on 2D poses. While previous work requires strong priors on camera rotations in the training data set, we learn the distribution of camera angles which significantly improves the performance. Another part of our contribution is to stabilize training with normalizing flows on high-dimensional 3D pose data by first projecting the 2D poses to a linear subspace. We outperform the state-of-the-art unsupervised human pose estimation methods on the benchmark datasets Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP in many metrics.
Dance experts often view dance as a hierarchy of information, spanning low-level (raw images, image sequences), mid-levels (human poses and bodypart movements), and high-level (dance genre). We propose a Hierarchical Dance Video Recognition framework (HDVR). HDVR estimates 2D pose sequences, tracks dancers, and then simultaneously estimates corresponding 3D poses and 3D-to-2D imaging parameters, without requiring ground truth for 3D poses. Unlike most methods that work on a single person, our tracking works on multiple dancers, under occlusions. From the estimated 3D pose sequence, HDVR extracts body part movements, and therefrom dance genre. The resulting hierarchical dance representation is explainable to experts. To overcome noise and interframe correspondence ambiguities, we enforce spatial and temporal motion smoothness and photometric continuity over time. We use an LSTM network to extract 3D movement subsequences from which we recognize the dance genre. For experiments, we have identified 154 movement types, of 16 body parts, and assembled a new University of Illinois Dance (UID) Dataset, containing 1143 video clips of 9 genres covering 30 hours, annotated with movement and genre labels. Our experimental results demonstrate that our algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art 3D pose estimation methods, which also enhances our dance recognition performance.
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 2D joint 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 outperforms 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.
We propose a novel method based on teacher-student learning framework for 3D human pose estimation without any 3D annotation or side information. To solve this unsupervised-learning problem, the teacher network adopts pose-dictionary-based modeling for regularization to estimate a physically plausible 3D pose. To handle the decomposition ambiguity in the teacher network, we propose a cycle-consistent architecture promoting a 3D rotation-invariant property to train the teacher network. To further improve the estimation accuracy, the student network adopts a novel graph convolution network for flexibility to directly estimate the 3D coordinates. Another cycle-consistent architecture promoting 3D rotation-equivariant property is adopted to exploit geometry consistency, together with knowledge distillation from the teacher network to improve the pose estimation performance. We conduct extensive experiments on Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP. Our method reduces the 3D joint prediction error by 11.4% compared to state-of-the-art unsupervised methods and also outperforms many weakly-supervised methods that use side information on Human3.6M. Code will be available at https://github.com/sjtuxcx/ITES.
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.
Estimation of 3D human pose from monocular image has gained considerable attention, as a key step to several human-centric applications. However, generalizability of human pose estimation models developed using supervision on large-scale in-studio datasets remains questionable, as these models often perform unsatisfactorily on unseen in-the-wild environments. Though weakly-supervised models have been proposed to address this shortcoming, performance of such models relies on availability of paired supervision on some related tasks, such as 2D pose or multi-view image pairs. In contrast, we propose a novel kinematic-structure-preserved unsupervised 3D pose estimation framework, which is not restrained by any paired or unpaired weak supervisions. Our pose estimation framework relies on a minimal set of prior knowledge that defines the underlying kinematic 3D structure, such as skeletal joint connectivity information with bone-length ratios in a fixed canonical scale. The proposed model employs three consecutive differentiable transformations named as forward-kinematics, camera-projection and spatial-map transformation. This design not only acts as a suitable bottleneck stimulating effective pose disentanglement but also yields interpretable latent pose representations avoiding training of an explicit latent embedding to pose mapper. Furthermore, devoid of unstable adversarial setup, we re-utilize the decoder to formalize an energy-based loss, which enables us to learn from in-the-wild videos, beyond laboratory settings. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate our state-of-the-art unsupervised and weakly-supervised pose estimation performance on both Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP datasets. Qualitative results on unseen environments further establish our superior generalization ability.
Camera captured human pose is an outcome of several sources of variation. Performance of supervised 3D pose estimation approaches comes at the cost of dispensing with variations, such as shape and appearance, that may be useful for solving other related tasks. As a result, the learned model not only inculcates task-bias but also dataset-bias because of its strong reliance on the annotated samples, which also holds true for weakly-supervised models. Acknowledging this, we propose a self-supervised learning framework to disentangle such variations from unlabeled video frames. We leverage the prior knowledge on human skeleton and poses in the form of a single part-based 2D puppet model, human pose articulation constraints, and a set of unpaired 3D poses. Our differentiable formalization, bridging the representation gap between the 3D pose and spatial part maps, not only facilitates discovery of interpretable pose disentanglement but also allows us to operate on videos with diverse camera movements. Qualitative results on unseen in-the-wild datasets establish our superior generalization across multiple tasks beyond the primary tasks of 3D pose estimation and part segmentation. Furthermore, we demonstrate state-of-the-art weakly-supervised 3D pose estimation performance on both Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP datasets.