Leverage of Limb Detection in Pose Estimation for Vulnerable Road Users

Application of human pose estimation in intelligent driving has been gradually popular in recent years, as human pose could be informative in depiction of their actions and intentions. The focus of this paper is pose estimation for vulnerable road users with relatively small amounts of data. We present an improved framework, transferring general human pose estimation algorithms based on convolutional neural network to intelligent vehicle domain. Limb detection is introduced as an auxiliary task to allow explicit appearance-based modeling of spatial relationships among human keypoints. The network for keypoint detection is initialized with the parameters in limb detection task. Besides, the produced limb heatmaps are incorporated with keypoint heatmaps as extra source to gain the final keypoint locations. Concerning practical application, we adapt the widely used pose estimation networks to our proposed framework and evaluate them on the newly introduced TDCB-Pose dataset. The experiment results validate our method, and demonstrate the leverage of limb detection in human pose estimation without abundant data.