Multi-view pose generator based on deep learning for monocular 3D human pose estimation

Abstract

In this paper, we study the problem of monocular 3D human pose estimation based on deep learning. Due to single view limitations, the monocular human pose estimation cannot avoid the inherent occlusion problem. The commonmethods use themulti-view based 3D pose estimationmethod to solve this problem. However, single-view images cannot be used directly in multi-view methods, which greatly limits practical applications. To address the above-mentioned issues, we propose a novel end-to-end 3D pose estimation network for monocular 3D human pose estimation. First, we propose a multi-view pose generator to predict multi-view 2D poses from the 2D poses in a single view. Secondly, we propose a simple but effective data augmentation method for generating multi-view 2D pose annotations, on account of the existing datasets (e.g., Human3.6M, etc.) not containing a large number of 2D pose annotations in different views. Thirdly, we employ graph convolutional network to infer a 3D pose from multi-view 2D poses. From experiments conducted on public datasets, the results have verified the effectiveness of our method. Furthermore, the ablation studies show that our method improved the performance of existing 3D pose estimation networks.