Model-based human pose estimation is currently approached through two different paradigms. Optimizationbased methods fit a parametric body model to 2D observations in an iterative manner, leading to accurate imagemodel alignments, but are often slow and sensitive to the initialization. In contrast, regression-based methods, that use a deep network to directly estimate the model parameters from pixels, tend to provide reasonable, but not pixel accurate, results while requiring huge amounts of supervision. In this work, instead of investigating which approach is better, our key insight is that the two paradigms can form a strong collaboration. A reasonable, directly regressed estimate from the network can initialize the iterative optimization making the fitting faster and more accurate. Similarly, a pixel accurate fit from iterative optimization can act as strong supervision for the network. This is the core of our proposed approach SPIN (SMPL oPtimization IN the loop). The deep network initializes an iterative optimization routine that fits the body model to 2D joints within the training loop, and the fitted estimate is subsequently used to supervise the network. Our approach is self-improving by nature, since better network estimates can lead the optimization to better solutions, while more accurate optimization fits provide better supervision for the network. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in different settings, where 3D ground truth is scarce, or not available, and we consistently outperform the state-of-the-art model-based pose estimation approaches by significant margins. The project website with videos, results, and code can be found at https://seas.upenn.edu/˜nkolot/projects/spin.

To facilitate the analysis of human actions, interactions and emotions, we compute a 3D model of human body pose, hand pose, and facial expression from a single monocular image. To achieve this, we use thousands of 3D scans to train a new, unified, 3D model of the human body, SMPL-X, that extends SMPL with fully articulated hands and an expressive face. Learning to regress the parameters of SMPL-X directly from images is challenging without paired images and 3D ground truth. Consequently, we follow the approach of SMPLify, which estimates 2D features and then optimizes model parameters to fit the features. We improve on SMPLify in several significant ways: (1) we detect 2D features corresponding to the face, hands, and feet and fit the full SMPL-X model to these; (2) we train a new neural network pose prior using a large MoCap dataset; (3) we define a new interpenetration penalty that is both fast and accurate; (4) we automatically detect gender and the appropriate body models (male, female, or neutral); (5) our PyTorch implementation achieves a speedup of more than 8× over Chumpy. We use the new method, SMPLify-X, to fit SMPL-X to both controlled images and images in the wild. We evaluate 3D accuracy on a new curated dataset comprising 100 images with pseudo ground-truth. This is a step towards automatic expressive human capture from monocular RGB data. The models, code, and data are available for research purposes at https://smpl-x.is.tue.mpg.de.

This paper addresses the challenge of 3D human pose estimation from a single color image. Despite the general success of the end-to-end learning paradigm, top performing approaches employ a two-step solution consisting of a Convolutional Network (ConvNet) for 2D joint localization and a subsequent optimization step to recover 3D pose. In this paper, we identify the representation of 3D pose as a critical issue with current ConvNet approaches and make two important contributions towards validating the value of end-to-end learning for this task. First, we propose a fine discretization of the 3D space around the subject and train a ConvNet to predict per voxel likelihoods for each joint. This creates a natural representation for 3D pose and greatly improves performance over the direct regression of joint coordinates. Second, to further improve upon initial estimates, we employ a coarse-to-fine prediction scheme. This step addresses the large dimensionality increase and enables iterative refinement and repeated processing of the image features. The proposed approach outperforms all state-of-theart methods on standard benchmarks achieving a relative error reduction greater than 30% on average. Additionally, we investigate using our volumetric representation in a related architecture which is suboptimal compared to our endto-end approach, but is of practical interest, since it enables training when no image with corresponding 3D groundtruth is available, and allows us to present compelling results for in-the-wild images.

This paper addresses the problem of 3D human pose and shape estimation from a single image. Previous approaches consider a parametric model of the human body, SMPL, and attempt to regress the model parameters that give rise to a mesh consistent with image evidence. This parameter regression has been a very challenging task, with modelbased approaches underperforming compared to nonparametric solutions in terms of pose estimation. In our work, we propose to relax this heavy reliance on the model's parameter space. We still retain the topology of the SMPL template mesh, but instead of predicting model parameters, we directly regress the 3D location of the mesh vertices. This is a heavy task for a typical network, but our key insight is that the regression becomes significantly easier using a Graph-CNN. This architecture allows us to explicitly encode the template mesh structure within the network and leverage the spatial locality the mesh has to offer. Image-based features are attached to the mesh vertices and the Graph-CNN is responsible to process them on the mesh structure, while the regression target for each vertex is its 3D location. Having recovered the complete 3D geometry of the mesh, if we still require a specific model parametrization, this can be reliably regressed from the vertices locations. We demonstrate the flexibility and the effectiveness of our proposed graphbased mesh regression by attaching different types of features on the mesh vertices. In all cases, we outperform the comparable baselines relying on model parameter regression, while we also achieve state-of-the-art results among model-based pose estimation approaches. 1 arXiv:1905.03244v1 [cs.CV] 8 May 2019• We achieve state-of-the-art results among model-based pose estimation approaches.

This work addresses the problem of estimating the full body 3D human pose and shape from a single color image. This is a task where iterative optimization-based solutions have typically prevailed, while Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) have suffered because of the lack of training data and their low resolution 3D predictions. Our work aims to bridge this gap and proposes an efficient and effective direct prediction method based on ConvNets. Central part to our approach is the incorporation of a parametric statistical body shape model (SMPL) within our end-to-end framework. This allows us to get very detailed 3D mesh results, while requiring estimation only of a small number of parameters, making it friendly for direct network prediction. Interestingly, we demonstrate that these parameters can be predicted reliably only from 2D keypoints and masks. These are typical outputs of generic 2D human analysis ConvNets, allowing us to relax the massive requirement that images with 3D shape ground truth are available for training. Simultaneously, by maintaining differentiability, at training time we generate the 3D mesh from the estimated parameters and optimize explicitly for the surface using a 3D per-vertex loss. Finally, a differentiable renderer is employed to project the 3D mesh to the image, which enables further refinement of the network, by optimizing for the consistency of the projection with 2D annotations (i.e., 2D keypoints or masks). The proposed approach outperforms previous baselines on this task and offers an attractive solution for direct prediction of 3D shape from a single color image.

Abstract-This paper presents a novel approach to estimating the continuous six degree of freedom (6-DoF) pose (3D translation and rotation) of an object from a single RGB image. The approach combines semantic keypoints predicted by a convolutional network (convnet) with a deformable shape model. Unlike prior work, we are agnostic to whether the object is textured or textureless, as the convnet learns the optimal representation from the available training image data. Furthermore, the approach can be applied to instance-and class-based pose recovery. Empirically, we show that the proposed approach can accurately recover the 6-DoF object pose for both instanceand class-based scenarios with a cluttered background. For class-based object pose estimation, state-of-the-art accuracy is shown on the large-scale PASCAL3D+ dataset.

Our ability to train end-to-end systems for 3D human pose estimation from single images is currently constrained by the limited availability of 3D annotations for natural images. Most datasets are captured using Motion Capture (MoCap) systems in a studio setting and it is difficult to reach the variability of 2D human pose datasets, like MPII or LSP. To alleviate the need for accurate 3D ground truth, we propose to use a weaker supervision signal provided by the ordinal depths of human joints. This information can be acquired by human annotators for a wide range of images and poses. We showcase the effectiveness and flexibility of training Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) with these ordinal relations in different settings, always achieving competitive performance with ConvNets trained with accurate 3D joint coordinates. Additionally, to demonstrate the potential of the approach, we augment the popular LSP and MPII datasets with ordinal depth annotations. This extension allows us to present quantitative and qualitative evaluation in non-studio conditions. Simultaneously, these ordinal annotations can be easily incorporated in the training procedure of typical ConvNets for 3D human pose. Through this inclusion we achieve new state-of-the-art performance for the relevant benchmarks and validate the effectiveness of ordinal depth supervision for 3D human pose.

Recent advances with Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) have shifted the bottleneck for many computer vision tasks to annotated data collection. In this paper, we present a geometry-driven approach to automatically collect annotations for human pose prediction tasks. Starting from a generic ConvNet for 2D human pose, and assuming a multi-view setup, we describe an automatic way to collect accurate 3D human pose annotations. We capitalize on constraints offered by the 3D geometry of the camera setup and the 3D structure of the human body to probabilistically combine per view 2D ConvNet predictions into a globally optimal 3D pose. This 3D pose is used as the basis for harvesting annotations. The benefit of the annotations produced automatically with our approach is demonstrated in two challenging settings: (i) fine-tuning a generic ConvNet-based 2D pose predictor to capture the discriminative aspects of a subject's appearance (i.e.,"personalization"), and (ii) training a ConvNet from scratch for single view 3D human pose prediction without leveraging 3D pose groundtruth. The proposed multi-view pose estimator achieves state-of-the-art results on standard benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method in exploiting the available multi-view information.