Learning to estimate human pose with data driven belief propagation

We propose a statistical formulation for 2D human pose estimation from single images. The human body configuration is modeled by a Markov network and the estimation problem is to infer pose parameters from image cues such as appearance, shape, edge, and color. From a set of hand labeled images, we accumulate prior knowledge of 2D body shapes by learning their low-dimensional representations for inference of pose parameters. A data driven belief propagation Monte Carlo algorithm, utilizing importance sampling functions built from bottom-up visual cues, is proposed for efficient probabilistic inference. Contrasted to the few sequential statistical formulations in the literature, our algorithm integrates both top-down as well as bottom-up reasoning mechanisms, and can carry out the inference tasks in parallel. Experimental results demonstrate the potency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in estimating 2D human pose from single images.