English

Convolutional Pose Machines

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2016-04-13 v4

Abstract

Pose Machines provide a sequential prediction framework for learning rich implicit spatial models. In this work we show a systematic design for how convolutional networks can be incorporated into the pose machine framework for learning image features and image-dependent spatial models for the task of pose estimation. The contribution of this paper is to implicitly model long-range dependencies between variables in structured prediction tasks such as articulated pose estimation. We achieve this by designing a sequential architecture composed of convolutional networks that directly operate on belief maps from previous stages, producing increasingly refined estimates for part locations, without the need for explicit graphical model-style inference. Our approach addresses the characteristic difficulty of vanishing gradients during training by providing a natural learning objective function that enforces intermediate supervision, thereby replenishing back-propagated gradients and conditioning the learning procedure. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and outperform competing methods on standard benchmarks including the MPII, LSP, and FLIC datasets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1602.00134,
  title  = {Convolutional Pose Machines},
  author = {Shih-En Wei and Varun Ramakrishna and Takeo Kanade and Yaser Sheikh},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1602.00134},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

camera ready

R2 v1 2026-06-22T12:39:59.746Z