Synpose: A Large-Scale and Densely Annotated Synthetic Dataset for Human Pose Estimation in Classroom

Deep learning-based methods for human pose estimation require large volumes of training data to achieve superior performance. However, data acquisition in classroom environments raises privacy concerns, which will undoubtedly hinder the development of the latest deep learning techniques in education domain. Due to the absence of large, richly annotated classroom datasets, research into classroom observation has had to be done by manually collecting and annotating datasets. Unfortunately, the annotation of such data is time-consuming and challenging in over-crowded classrooms. To break through these limitations, we open source SynPose, a large, densely labeled synthetic dataset specifically designed for crowded human pose estimation in classroom and meeting scenarios. Moreover, we propose a novel CTGAN to bridge the domain gap. Comprehensive experiments on real-world classroom images show that our proposed dataset and method deliver important performance benefits compared to existing datasets, revealing the potential of SynPose for future studies.