Recent 2D-to-3D human pose estimation works tend to utilize the graph structure formed by the topology of the human skeleton. However, we argue that this skeletal topology is too sparse to reflect the body structure and suffer from serious 2D-to-3D ambiguity problem. To overcome these weaknesses, we propose a novel graph convolution network architecture, Hierarchical Graph Networks (HGN). It is based on denser graph topology generated by our multi-scale graph structure building strategy, thus providing more delicate geometric information. The proposed architecture contains three sparse-to-fine representation subnetworks organized in parallel, in which multi-scale graph-structured features are processed and exchange information through a novel feature fusion strategy, leading to rich hierarchical representations. We also introduce a 3D coarse mesh constraint to further boost detail-related feature learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our HGN achieves the state-of-the art performance with reduced network parameters
Human pose estimation aims to locate the human body parts and build human body representation (e.g., body skeleton) from input data such as images and videos. It has drawn increasing attention during the past decade and has been utilized in a wide range of applications including human-computer interaction, motion analysis, augmented reality, and virtual reality. Although the recently developed deep learning-based solutions have achieved high performance in human pose estimation, there still remain challenges due to insufficient training data, depth ambiguities, and occlusions. The goal of this survey paper is to provide a comprehensive review of recent deep learning-based solutions for both 2D and 3D pose estimation via a systematic analysis and comparison of these solutions based on their input data and inference procedures. More than 240 research papers since 2014 are covered in this survey. Furthermore, 2D and 3D human pose estimation datasets and evaluation metrics are included. Quantitative performance comparisons of the reviewed methods on popular datasets are summarized and discussed. Finally, the challenges involved, applications, and future research directions are concluded. We also provide a regularly updated project page on: \url{//github.com/zczcwh/DL-HPE}
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) draw their strength from explicitly modeling the topological information of structured data. However, existing GNNs suffer from limited capability in capturing the hierarchical graph representation which plays an important role in graph classification. In this paper, we innovatively propose hierarchical graph capsule network (HGCN) that can jointly learn node embeddings and extract graph hierarchies. Specifically, disentangled graph capsules are established by identifying heterogeneous factors underlying each node, such that their instantiation parameters represent different properties of the same entity. To learn the hierarchical representation, HGCN characterizes the part-whole relationship between lower-level capsules (part) and higher-level capsules (whole) by explicitly considering the structure information among the parts. Experimental studies demonstrate the effectiveness of HGCN and the contribution of each component.
Co-saliency detection aims to discover the common and salient foregrounds from a group of relevant images. For this task, we present a novel adaptive graph convolutional network with attention graph clustering (GCAGC). Three major contributions have been made, and are experimentally shown to have substantial practical merits. First, we propose a graph convolutional network design to extract information cues to characterize the intra- and interimage correspondence. Second, we develop an attention graph clustering algorithm to discriminate the common objects from all the salient foreground objects in an unsupervised fashion. Third, we present a unified framework with encoder-decoder structure to jointly train and optimize the graph convolutional network, attention graph cluster, and co-saliency detection decoder in an end-to-end manner. We evaluate our proposed GCAGC method on three cosaliency detection benchmark datasets (iCoseg, Cosal2015 and COCO-SEG). Our GCAGC method obtains significant improvements over the state-of-the-arts on most of them.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which generalize deep neural networks to graph-structured data, have drawn considerable attention and achieved state-of-the-art performance in numerous graph related tasks. However, existing GNN models mainly focus on designing graph convolution operations. The graph pooling (or downsampling) operations, that play an important role in learning hierarchical representations, are usually overlooked. In this paper, we propose a novel graph pooling operator, called Hierarchical Graph Pooling with Structure Learning (HGP-SL), which can be integrated into various graph neural network architectures. HGP-SL incorporates graph pooling and structure learning into a unified module to generate hierarchical representations of graphs. More specifically, the graph pooling operation adaptively selects a subset of nodes to form an induced subgraph for the subsequent layers. To preserve the integrity of graph's topological information, we further introduce a structure learning mechanism to learn a refined graph structure for the pooled graph at each layer. By combining HGP-SL operator with graph neural networks, we perform graph level representation learning with focus on graph classification task. Experimental results on six widely used benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have been successfully applied in node classification tasks of network mining. However, most of these models based on neighborhood aggregation are usually shallow and lack the "graph pooling" mechanism, which prevents the model from obtaining adequate global information. In order to increase the receptive field, we propose a novel deep Hierarchical Graph Convolutional Network (H-GCN) for semi-supervised node classification. H-GCN first repeatedly aggregates structurally similar nodes to hyper-nodes and then refines the coarsened graph to the original to restore the representation for each node. Instead of merely aggregating one- or two-hop neighborhood information, the proposed coarsening procedure enlarges the receptive field for each node, hence more global information can be captured. The proposed H-GCN model shows strong empirical performance on various public benchmark graph datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art methods and acquiring up to 5.9% performance improvement in terms of accuracy. In addition, when only a few labeled samples are provided, our model gains substantial improvements.
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have been successfully applied in node classification tasks of network mining. However, most of these models based on neighborhood aggregation are usually shallow and lack the "graph pooling" mechanism, which prevents the model from obtaining adequate global information. In order to increase the receptive field, we propose a novel deep Hierarchical Graph Convolutional Network (H-GCN) for semi-supervised node classification. H-GCN first repeatedly aggregates structurally similar nodes to hyper-nodes and then refines the coarsened graph to the original to restore the representation for each node. Instead of merely aggregating one- or two-hop neighborhood information, the proposed coarsening procedure enlarges the receptive field for each node, hence more global information can be learned. Comprehensive experiments conducted on public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method over the state-of-art methods. Notably, our model gains substantial improvements when only a few labeled samples are provided.
This work addresses a novel and challenging problem of estimating the full 3D hand shape and pose from a single RGB image. Most current methods in 3D hand analysis from monocular RGB images only focus on estimating the 3D locations of hand keypoints, which cannot fully express the 3D shape of hand. In contrast, we propose a Graph Convolutional Neural Network (Graph CNN) based method to reconstruct a full 3D mesh of hand surface that contains richer information of both 3D hand shape and pose. To train networks with full supervision, we create a large-scale synthetic dataset containing both ground truth 3D meshes and 3D poses. When fine-tuning the networks on real-world datasets without 3D ground truth, we propose a weakly-supervised approach by leveraging the depth map as a weak supervision in training. Through extensive evaluations on our proposed new datasets and two public datasets, we show that our proposed method can produce accurate and reasonable 3D hand mesh, and can achieve superior 3D hand pose estimation accuracy when compared with state-of-the-art methods.
This is an official pytorch implementation of Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation. In this work, we are interested in the human pose estimation problem with a focus on learning reliable high-resolution representations. Most existing methods recover high-resolution representations from low-resolution representations produced by a high-to-low resolution network. Instead, our proposed network maintains high-resolution representations through the whole process. We start from a high-resolution subnetwork as the first stage, gradually add high-to-low resolution subnetworks one by one to form more stages, and connect the mutli-resolution subnetworks in parallel. We conduct repeated multi-scale fusions such that each of the high-to-low resolution representations receives information from other parallel representations over and over, leading to rich high-resolution representations. As a result, the predicted keypoint heatmap is potentially more accurate and spatially more precise. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our network through the superior pose estimation results over two benchmark datasets: the COCO keypoint detection dataset and the MPII Human Pose dataset. The code and models have been publicly available at \url{//github.com/leoxiaobin/deep-high-resolution-net.pytorch}.
This study considers the 3D human pose estimation problem in a single RGB image by proposing a conditional random field (CRF) model over 2D poses, in which the 3D pose is obtained as a byproduct of the inference process. The unary term of the proposed CRF model is defined based on a powerful heat-map regression network, which has been proposed for 2D human pose estimation. This study also presents a regression network for lifting the 2D pose to 3D pose and proposes the prior term based on the consistency between the estimated 3D pose and the 2D pose. To obtain the approximate solution of the proposed CRF model, the N-best strategy is adopted. The proposed inference algorithm can be viewed as sequential processes of bottom-up generation of 2D and 3D pose proposals from the input 2D image based on deep networks and top-down verification of such proposals by checking their consistencies. To evaluate the proposed method, we use two large-scale datasets: Human3.6M and HumanEva. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art 3D human pose estimation performance.
The task of multi-person human pose estimation in natural scenes is quite challenging. Existing methods include both top-down and bottom-up approaches. The main advantage of bottom-up methods is its excellent tradeoff between estimation accuracy and computational cost. We follow this path and aim to design smaller, faster, and more accurate neural networks for the regression of keypoints and limb association vectors. These two regression tasks are naturally dependent on each other. In this work, we propose a dual-path network specially designed for multi-person human pose estimation, and compare our performance with the openpose network in aspects of model size, forward speed, and estimation accuracy.