Human Pose Estimation in Space and Time Using 3D CNN

This paper explores the capabilities of convolutional neural networks to deal with a task that is easily manageable for humans: perceiving 3D pose of a human body from varying angles. However, in our approach, we are restricted to using a monocular vision system. For this purpose, we apply a convolutional neural network approach on RGB videos and extend it to three dimensional convolutions. This is done via encoding the time dimension in videos as the 3\(^\mathrm{rd}\) dimension in convolutional space, and directly regressing to human body joint positions in 3D coordinate space. This research shows the ability of such a network to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the selected Human3.6M dataset, thus demonstrating the possibility of successfully representing temporal data with an additional dimension in the convolutional operation.