Boosted Multiple Deformable Trees for Parsing Human Poses

Tree-structured models have been widely used for human pose estimation, in either 2D or 3D. While such models allow efficient learning and inference, they fail to capture additional dependencies between body parts, other than kinematic constraints. In this paper, we consider the use of multiple tree models, rather than a single tree model for human pose estimation. Our model can alleviate the limitations of a single tree-structured model by combining information provided across different tree models. The parameters of each individual tree model are trained via standard learning algorithms in a single tree-structured model. Different tree models are combined in a discriminative fashion by a boosting procedure. We present experimental results showing the improvement of our model over previous approaches on a very challenging dataset.