Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for 3D Human Pose Estimation

Abstract

Training an accurate 3D human pose estimator often requires a large amount of 3D ground-truth data which is inefficient and costly to collect. Previous methods have either resorted to weakly supervised methods to reduce the demand of ground-truth data for training, or using synthetically-generated but photo-realistic samples to enlarge the training data pool. Nevertheless, the former methods mainly require either additional supervision, such as unpaired 3D ground-truth data, or the camera parameters in multiview settings. On the other hand, the latter methods require accurately textured models, illumination configurations and background which need careful engineering. To address these problems, we propose a domain adaptation framework with unsupervised knowledge transfer, which aims at leveraging the knowledge in multi-modality data of the easy-to-get synthetic depth datasets to better train a pose estimator on the real-world datasets. Specifically, the framework first trains two pose estimators on synthetically-generated depth images and human body segmentation masks with full supervision, while jointly learning a human body segmentation module from the predicted 2D poses. Subsequently, the learned pose estimator and the segmentation module are applied to the real-world dataset to unsupervisedly learn a new RGB image based 2D/3D human pose estimator. Here, the knowledge encoded in the supervised learning modules are used to regularize a pose estimator without ground-truth annotations. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate significant improvements over weakly supervised methods when no ground-truth annotations are available. Further experiments with ground-truth annotations show that the proposed framework can outperform state-of-the-art fully supervised methods. In addition, we conducted ablation studies to examine the impact of each loss term, as well as with different amount of supervisions signal.

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Poster

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Framework

We propose a domain adaptation framework with unsupervised knowledge transfer, which aims at leveraging the knowledge in the easy-to-get synthetic depth image dataset to unsupervisedly or better train a pose estimator on real-world dataset. Firstly, two human pose estimators are trained on synthetically generated depth images and body segmentation masks with full supervision, while jointly learning a body segmentation module from the predicted 2D poses. Subsequently, the learned segmentation mask based pose estimator and the segmentation module are applied to real-world dataset to unsupervisedly learn a new RGB image based 2D/3D human pose estimator. Here, the knowledge encoded in the supervised learning modules (i.e. pose estimation and body segmentation) are used to regularize a new pose estimator without any annotations.

The height-map is generated by existing height estimation algorithm [33] using calibrated camera parameters and the body silhouettes.(a) Illustration of height-map generation with pre-calibrated monocular camera, (b) Anatomical decomposition of Skeleton based on height [35].

Qualitative Results

BibTex

@inproceedings{zhang2019unsupervised,
    title={Unsupervised domain adaptation for 3D human pose estimation},
    author={Zhang, Xiheng and Wong, Yongkang and Kankanhalli, Mohan S and Geng, Weidong},
    booktitle={Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Multimedia},
    pages={926--934},
    year={2019}
}

Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister's Office, Singapore under its Strategic Capability Research Centres Funding Initiative, and the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No.2017YFB1303201).