Multi-camera Torso Pose Estimation using Graph Neural Networks
This work addresses the need for reliable and cost-effective human pose estimation for service and assistive robots in wide areas like apartments, though it is incremental as it builds on existing graph neural network methods.
The paper tackles the problem of estimating human torso pose in multi-camera setups by using graph neural networks to fuse data from multiple low-resolution RGB cameras, achieving a mean absolute error below 125 mm for location and 10 degrees for orientation.
Estimating the location and orientation of humans is an essential skill for service and assistive robots. To achieve a reliable estimation in a wide area such as an apartment, multiple RGBD cameras are frequently used. Firstly, these setups are relatively expensive. Secondly, they seldom perform an effective data fusion using the multiple camera sources at an early stage of the processing pipeline. Occlusions and partial views make this second point very relevant in these scenarios. The proposal presented in this paper makes use of graph neural networks to merge the information acquired from multiple camera sources, achieving a mean absolute error below 125 mm for the location and 10 degrees for the orientation using low-resolution RGB images. The experiments, conducted in an apartment with three cameras, benchmarked two different graph neural network implementations and a third architecture based on fully connected layers. The software used has been released as open-source in a public repository (https://github.com/vangiel/WheresTheFellow).