Segmentation
PoseCut: Simultaneous Segmentation and 3D Pose Estimation of Humans Using Dynamic Graph-Cuts
Matthieu Bray1
, Pushmeet Kohli1
and Philip H.S. Torr1 
| (1) |
Dept. of Computing, Oxford Brookes University, |
Abstract
We present a novel algorithm for performing integrated segmentation and 3D pose estimation of a human body from multiple views. Unlike other related state of the art techniques which focus on either
segmentation or pose estimation individually, our approach tackles these two tasks together. Normally, when optimizing for
pose, it is traditional to use some fixed set of features, e.g. edges or chamfer maps. In contrast, our novel approach consists
of optimizing a cost function based on a Markov Random Field (MRF). This has the advantage that we can use all the information in the image: edges, background and foreground appearances,
as well as the prior information on the shape and pose of the subject and combine them in a Bayesian framework. Previously,
optimizing such a cost function would have been computationally infeasible. However, our recent research in dynamic graph
cuts allows this to be done much more efficiently than before. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on challenging
motion sequences. Note that although we target the human pose inference problem in the paper, our method is completely generic
and can be used to segment and infer the pose of any specified rigid, deformable or articulated object.
Electronic supplementary material Electronic supplementary material is available for this chapter.
This work was supported by the EPSRC research grant GR/T21790/01(P) and the IST Programme of the European Community, under the PASCAL Network of Excellence, IST-2002-506778.