Pose estimator and tracker using temporal flow maps for limbs

Abstract: For human pose estimation in videos, it is significant how to use temporal information between frames. In this paper, we propose temporal flow maps for limbs (TML) and a multi-stride method to estimate and track human poses. The proposed temporal flow maps are unit vectors describing the limbs' movements. We constructed a network to learn both spatial information and temporal information end-to-end. Spatial information such as joint heatmaps and part affinity fields is regressed in the spatial network part, and the TML is regressed in the temporal network part. We also propose a data augmentation method to learn various types of TML better. The proposed multi-stride method expands the data by randomly selecting two frames within a defined range. We demonstrate that the proposed method efficiently estimates and tracks human poses on the PoseTrack 2017 and 2018 datasets.