Pose Estimation of Interacting People using Pictorial Structures

Pose estimation of people have had great progress in recentyears but so far research has dealt with single persons.In this paper we address some of the challenges that arisewhen doing pose estimation of interacting people. We buildon the pictorial structures framework and make importantcontributions by combining color-based appearance andedge information using a measure of the local quality ofthe appearance feature. In this way we not only combinethe two types of features but dynamically find the optimalweighting of them. We further enable the method to handleocclusions by searching a foreground mask for possibleoccluded body parts and then applying extra strong kinematicconstraints to find the true occluded body parts. Theeffect of applying our two contributions are show throughboth qualitative and quantitative tests and show a clear improvementon the ability to correctly localize body parts.