SMPLy Benchmarking 3D Human Pose Estimation in the Wild (2012.02743v1)

Abstract: Predicting 3D human pose from images has seen great recent improvements. Novel approaches that can even predict both pose and shape from a single input image have been introduced, often relying on a parametric model of the human body such as SMPL. While qualitative results for such methods are often shown for images captured in-the-wild, a proper benchmark in such conditions is still missing, as it is cumbersome to obtain ground-truth 3D poses elsewhere than in a motion capture room. This paper presents a pipeline to easily produce and validate such a dataset with accurate ground-truth, with which we benchmark recent 3D human pose estimation methods in-the-wild. We make use of the recently introduced Mannequin Challenge dataset which contains in-the-wild videos of people frozen in action like statues and leverage the fact that people are static and the camera moving to accurately fit the SMPL model on the sequences. A total of 24,428 frames with registered body models are then selected from 567 scenes at almost no cost, using only online RGB videos. We benchmark state-of-the-art SMPL-based human pose estimation methods on this dataset. Our results highlight that challenges remain, in particular for difficult poses or for scenes where the persons are partially truncated or occluded.