Spatial Shortcut Network for Human Pose Estimation

Like many computer vision problems, human pose estimation is a challenging problem in that recognizing a body part requires not only information from local area but also from areas with large spatial distance. In order to spatially pass information, large convolutional kernels and deep layers have been normally used, introducing high computation cost and large parameter space. Luckily for pose estimation, human body is geometrically structured in images, enabling modeling of spatial dependency. In this paper, we propose a spatial shortcut network for pose estimation task, where information is easier to flow spatially. We evaluate our model with detailed analyses and present its outstanding performance with smaller structure.

Learning deep representation from coarse to fine for face alignment

In this paper, we propose a novel face alignment method that trains deep convolutional network from coarse to fine. It divides given landmarks into principal subset and elaborate subset. We firstly keep a large weight for principal subset to make our network primarily predict their locations while slightly take elaborate subset into account. Next the weight of principal subset is gradually decreased until two subsets have equivalent weights. This process contributes to learn a good initial model and search the optimal model smoothly to avoid missing fairly good intermediate models in subsequent procedures. On the challenging COFW dataset [1], our method achieves 6.33% mean error with a reduction of 21.37% compared with the best previous result [2].