MoCap-guided Data Augmentation for 3D Pose Estimation in the Wild
This addresses the lack of annotated training data for 3D pose estimation, enabling better generalization to real-world images, though it is incremental as it builds on existing CNN and data augmentation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of 3D human pose estimation in the wild by generating photorealistic synthetic images with 3D pose annotations using MoCap data and an image-based synthesis engine, resulting in state-of-the-art performance on Human3.6M and promising results on LSP datasets.
This paper addresses the problem of 3D human pose estimation in the wild. A significant challenge is the lack of training data, i.e., 2D images of humans annotated with 3D poses. Such data is necessary to train state-of-the-art CNN architectures. Here, we propose a solution to generate a large set of photorealistic synthetic images of humans with 3D pose annotations. We introduce an image-based synthesis engine that artificially augments a dataset of real images with 2D human pose annotations using 3D Motion Capture (MoCap) data. Given a candidate 3D pose our algorithm selects for each joint an image whose 2D pose locally matches the projected 3D pose. The selected images are then combined to generate a new synthetic image by stitching local image patches in a kinematically constrained manner. The resulting images are used to train an end-to-end CNN for full-body 3D pose estimation. We cluster the training data into a large number of pose classes and tackle pose estimation as a K-way classification problem. Such an approach is viable only with large training sets such as ours. Our method outperforms the state of the art in terms of 3D pose estimation in controlled environments (Human3.6M) and shows promising results for in-the-wild images (LSP). This demonstrates that CNNs trained on artificial images generalize well to real images.