2023/11/06 by Qitao Zhao, Ce Zheng, Zhao, Qitao +5 · 3 citations
Computer Science · #Advanced Vision and Imaging #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Human Pose and Action Recognition #Video Surveillance and Tracking Methods
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2311.03312
openalex publication_date 2023/11/06 · openalex created_date 2023/11/08 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The dominant paradigm in 3D human pose estimation that lifts a 2D pose sequence to 3D heavily relies on long-term temporal clues (i.e., using a daunting number of video frames) for improved accuracy, which incurs performance saturation, intractable computation and the non-causal problem. This can be attributed to their inherent inability to perceive spatial context as plain 2D joint coordinates carry no visual cues. To address this issue, we propose a straightforward yet powerful solution: leveraging the readily available intermediate visual representations produced by off-the-shelf (pre-trained) 2D pose detectors -- no finetuning on the 3D task is even needed. The key observation is that, while the pose detector learns to localize 2D joints, such representations (e.g., feature maps) implicitly encode the joint-centric spatial context thanks to the regional operations in backbone networks. We design a simple baseline named Context-Aware PoseFormer to showcase its effectiveness. Without access to any temporal information, the proposed method significantly outperforms its context-agnostic counterpart, PoseFormer, and other state-of-the-art methods using up to hundreds of video frames regarding both speed and precision. Project page: https://qitaozhao.github.io/ContextAware-PoseFormer