In this paper, we address the problem of estimating the positions of human
joints, i.e., articulated pose estimation. Recent state-of-the-art solutions
model two key issues, joint detection and spatial configuration refinement,
together using convolutional neural networks. Our work mainly focuses on
spatial configuration refinement by reducing variations of human poses
statistically, which is motivated by the observation that the scattered
distribution of the relative locations of joints e.g., the left wrist is
distributed nearly uniformly in a circular area around the left shoulder) makes
the learning of convolutional spatial models hard. We present a two-stage
normalization scheme, human body normalization and limb normalization, to make
the distribution of the relative joint locations compact, resulting in easier
learning of convolutional spatial models and more accurate pose estimation. In
addition, our empirical results show that incorporating multi-scale supervision
and multi-scale fusion into the joint detection network is beneficial.
Experiment results demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms
state-of-the-art methods on the benchmarks.

本文解决了人体关节位置估计的问题，提出了基于卷积神经网络的空间姿态模型优化方法，包括人体细节归一化，肢体归一化，以及多尺度监督和融合。实验表明，该方法在基准测试中表现优于现有的最佳方法。