Enhancing human parsing with region-level learning

Human parsing is very important in a diverse range of industrial applications. Despite the considerable progress that has been achieved, the performance of existing methods is still less than satisfactory, since these methods learn the shared features of various parsing labels at the image level. This limits the representativeness of the learnt features, especially when the distribution of parsing labels is imbalanced or the scale of different labels is substantially different. To address this limitation, a Region-level Parsing Refiner (RPR) is proposed to enhance parsing performance by the introduction of region-level parsing learning. Region-level parsing focuses specifically on small regions of the body, for example, the head. The proposed RPR is an adaptive module that can be integrated with different existing human parsing models to improve their performance. Extensive experiments are conducted on two benchmark datasets, and the results demonstrated the effectiveness of our RPR model in terms of improving the overall parsing performance as well as parsing rare labels. This method was successfully applied to a commercial application for the extraction of human body measurements and has been used in various online shopping platforms for clothing size recommendations. The code and dataset are released at this link https://github.com/applezhouyp/PRP.