Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation Using Transfer Learning and Improved CNN Supervision

We propose a new CNN-based method for regressing 3D human body pose from a single image that improves over the state-of-the-art on standard benchmarks by more than 25%. Our approach addresses the limited generalizability of models trained solely on the starkly limited publicly available 3D body pose data. Improved CNN supervision leverages first and second order parent relationships along the skeletal kinematic tree, and improved multi-level skip connections to learn better representations through implicit modification of the loss landscape. Further, transfer learning from 2D human pose prediction significantly improves accuracy and generalizability to unseen poses and camera views. Additionally, we contribute a new benchmark and training set for human body pose estimation from monocular images of real humans, that has ground truth captured with marker-less motion capture. It complements existing corpora with greater diversity in pose, human appearance, clothing, occlusion, and viewpoints, and enables increased scope of augmentation. The benchmark covers outdoors and indoor scenes.