Learning Body Pose via Specialized Maps

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 14 (NIPS 2001)

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Authors

Rómer Rosales, Stan Sclaroff

Abstract

A nonlinear supervised learning model, the Specialized Mappings Architecture (SMA), is described and applied to the estimation of human body pose from monocular images. The SMA consists of several specialized forward mapping functions and an inverse map(cid:173) ping function. Each specialized function maps certain domains of the input space (image features) onto the output space (body pose parameters). The key algorithmic problems faced are those of learning the specialized domains and mapping functions in an op(cid:173) timal way, as well as performing inference given inputs and knowl(cid:173) edge of the inverse function. Solutions to these problems employ the EM algorithm and alternating choices of conditional indepen(cid:173) dence assumptions. Performance of the approach is evaluated with synthetic and real video sequences of human motion.