Pictorial Human Spaces: How Well Do Humans Perceive a 3D Articulated Pose?

Human motion analysis in images and video is a central computer vision problem. Yet, there are no studies that reveal how humans perceive other people in images and how accurate they are. In this paper we aim to unveil some of the processing-as well as the levels of accuracy-involved in the 3D perception of people from images by assessing the human performance. Our contributions are: (1) the construction of an experimental apparatus that relates perception and measurement, in particular the visual and kinematic performance with respect to 3D ground truth when the human subject is presented an image of a person in a given pose, (2) the creation of a dataset containing images, articulated 2D and 3D pose ground truth, as well as synchronized eye movement recordings of human subjects, shown a variety of human body configurations, both easy and difficult, as well as their 're-enacted' 3D poses, (3) quantitative analysis revealing the human performance in 3D pose re-enactment tasks, the degree of stability in the visual fixation patterns of human subjects, and the way it correlates with different poses. We also discuss the implications of our findings for the construction of visual human sensing systems.