WPL-Based Constraint for 3D Human Pose Estimation from a Single Depth Image

Three-dimensional human pose estimation from depth maps is a fast-growing research area in computer vision. The distal joints of the human body are more flexible than the proximal joints, making it more difficult to estimate the distal joints. However, most existing methods ignore the difference between the distal joints and proximal joints. Moreover, the distal joint can be constrained by the proximal joint on the same kinematic chain. In our work, we model the human skeleton as the tree structure called the human-tree. Then, motivated by the WPL (weighted path length) in the data structure, we propose a WPL-based loss function to constrain the distal joints with the proximal joints in a global-to-local manner. Extensive experiments on benchmarks demonstrate that our method can effectively improve the performance of the distal joints.