A model-based approach for estimating human 3D poses in static images

Estimating human body poses in static images is important for many image understanding applications including semantic content extraction and image database query and retrieval. This problem is challenging due to the presence of clutter in the image, ambiguities in image observation, unknown human image boundary, and high-dimensional state space due to the complex articulated structure of the human body. Human pose estimation can be made more robust by integrating the detection of body components such as face and limbs, with the highly constrained structure of the articulated body. In this paper, a data-driven approach based on Markov chain Monte Carlo (DD-MCMC) is used, where component detection results generate state proposals for 3D pose estimation. To translate these observations into pose hypotheses, we introduce the use of "proposal maps," an efficient way of consolidating the evidence and generating 3D pose candidates during the MCMC search. Experimental results on a set of test images show that the method is able to estimate the human pose in static images of real scenes.