Articulated human pose estimation from monocular image is a challenging problem in computer vision. Occlusion is a main challenge for human pose estimation, which is largely ignored in popular tree structured models. The tree structured model is simple and convenient for exact inference, but short in modeling the occlusion coherence especially in the case of self-occlusion. We propose an occlusion relational graphical model, which is able to model both self-occlusion and occlusion by the other objects simultaneously. The proposed model can encode the interactions between human body parts and objects, and enables it to learn occlusion coherence from data discriminatively. We evaluate our model on several public benchmarks for human pose estimation, including challenging subsets featuring significant occlusion. The experimental results show that our method is superior to the previous state-of-the-arts, and is robust to occlusion for 2D human pose estimation.

Occlusion is a main challenge for human pose estimation, which is largely ignored in popular tree structure models. The tree structure model is simple and convenient for exact inference, but short in modeling the occlusion coherence especially in the case of self-occlusion. We propose an occlusion aware graphical model which is able to model both self-occlusion and occlusion by the other objects simultaneously. The proposed model structure can encodes the interactions between human body parts and objects, and hence enables it to learn occlusion coherence from data discriminatively. We evaluate our model on several public benchmarks for human pose estimation including challenging subsets featuring significant occlusion. The experimental results show that our method obtains comparable accuracy with the state-of-the-arts, and is robust to occlusion for 2D human pose estimation.

Simple tree model prevails for 2D pose estimation for its simplicity and efficiency. However, the limited kinetic constraints often lead to double-counting and damage the accuracy of leaf parts, and this is largely ignored in previous work. In this paper, we propose a novel enhanced tree model which incorporates both local kinetic constraints and global contextual constraints among non-adjacent parts. By introducing virtual parts, we are able to model richer constraints within a tree structure and dynamic programming can be utilized for efficient inference. Experiments on public benchmarks show that our method is more effective in tackling double counting problem and can improve the localization accuracy, especially for the challenging lower limbs.