Convolutional pose machines

@inproceedings{wei2016convolutional,
  title={Convolutional pose machines},
  author={Wei, Shih-En and Ramakrishna, Varun and Kanade, Takeo and Sheikh, Yaser},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the IEEE conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition},
  pages={4724--4732},
  year={2016}
}

Abstract

We introduce associative embedding, a novel method for supervising convolutional neural networks for the task of detection and grouping. A number of computer vision problems can be framed in this manner including multi-person pose estimation, instance segmentation, and multi-object tracking. Usually the grouping of detections is achieved with multi-stage pipelines, instead we propose an approach that teaches a network to simultaneously output detections and group assignments. This technique can be easily integrated into any state-of-the-art network architecture that produces pixel-wise predictions. We show how to apply this method to both multi-person pose estimation and instance segmentation and report state-of-the-art performance for multi-person pose on the MPII and MS-COCO datasets.