Efficient human pose estimation via parsing a tree structure based human model

Human pose estimation is the task of determining the states (location, orientation and scale) of each body part. It is important for many vision understanding applications, e.g. visual interactive gaming, immersive virtual reality, content-based image retrieval, etc. However, it remains a challenging task because of unknown image background, presence of clutter, partial occlusion and especially the high dimensional state space (usually 30+ dimensions). In this paper, we contribute to human pose estimation in two aspects. First, we design two efficient Markov Chain dynamics under the data-driven Markov Chain Monte Carlo (DDMCMC) framework to effectively explore the complex solution space. Second, we parse the tree structure state space into a lexicographic order according to the image observations and body topology, and the optimization process is conducted in this order. This realizes a much more efficient exploration than the sampling based search and exhaustive search, and thus achieves a tremendous speed-up. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method in estimating various kinds of human poses, even with cluttered background , poor illumination or partial self-occlusion.