3D Human Pose Estimation with 2D Human Pose and Depthmap

Three-dimensional human pose estimation models are conventionally based on RGB images or by assuming that accurately-estimated (near to ground truth) 2D human pose landmarks are available. Naturally, such data only contains information about two dimensions, while the 3D poses require the three dimensions of height, width, and depth. In this paper, we propose a new 3D human pose estimation model that takes an estimated 2D pose and the depthmap of the 2D pose as input to estimate 3D human pose. In our system, the estimated 2D pose is obtained from processing an RGB image using a 2D landmark detection network that produces noisy heatmap data. We compare our results with a Simple Linear Model (SLM) of other authors that takes accurately-estimated 2D pose landmarks as input and that has reached the state-of-the-art results for 3D human pose estimate using the Human3.6m dataset. Our results show that our model can achieve better performance than the SLM, and that our model can align the 2D landmark data with the depthmap automatically. We have also tested our network using estimated 2D poses and depthmaps separately. In our model, all three conditions (depthmap+2D pose, depthmap-only and 2D pose-only) are more accurate than the SLM with, surprisingly, the depthmap-only condition being comparable in accuracy with the depthmap+2D pose condition.