We propose to combine recent Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) models with depth imaging to obtain a reliable and fast multi-person pose estimation algorithm applicable to Human Robot Interaction (HRI) scenarios. Our hypothesis is that depth images contain less structures and are easier to process than RGB images while keeping the required information for human detection and pose inference, thus allowing the use of simpler networks for the task. Our contributions are threefold. (i) we propose a fast and efficient network based on residual blocks (called RPM) for body landmark localization from depth images; (ii) we created a public dataset DIH comprising more than 170k synthetic images of human bodies with various shapes and viewpoints as well as real (annotated) data for evaluation; (iii) we show that our model trained on synthetic data from scratch can perform well on real data, obtaining similar results to larger models initialized with pre-trained networks. It thus provides a good trade-off between performance and computation. Experiments on real data demonstrate the validity of our approach.

本文提出一种利用深度图像结合卷积神经网络实现快速且可靠的多人姿态估计算法的方案，可以有效地应用于人机交互领域；具体贡献包括提出了基于残差块的快速网络、构建了包括170k多张人体合成图像与真实标注数据在内的公开数据集用于评估，证明了该模型在真实数据上性能良好。

基于深度的实时卷积网络人体姿势估计