Multi-Person Pose Estimation via Column Generation
This addresses the problem of accurately and efficiently estimating poses for multiple people in images, which is incremental as it builds on existing optimization methods.
The paper tackles multi-person pose estimation in natural images by formulating it as an integer program and using column generation for optimization, achieving improved accuracy and speed on the MPII benchmark.
We study the problem of multi-person pose estimation in natural images. A pose estimate describes the spatial position and identity (head, foot, knee, etc.) of every non-occluded body part of a person. Pose estimation is difficult due to issues such as deformation and variation in body configurations and occlusion of parts, while multi-person settings add complications such as an unknown number of people, with unknown appearance and possible interactions in their poses and part locations. We give a novel integer program formulation of the multi-person pose estimation problem, in which variables correspond to assignments of parts in the image to poses in a two-tier, hierarchical way. This enables us to develop an efficient custom optimization procedure based on column generation, where columns are produced by exact optimization of very small scale integer programs. We demonstrate improved accuracy and speed for our method on the MPII multi-person pose estimation benchmark.