Unsupervised 3D Human Pose Estimation

Sammanfattning: The thesis proposes an unsupervised representation learning method to predict 3D human pose from a 2D skeleton via a VAEGAN (Variational Autoencoder Generative Adversarial Network) hybrid network. The method learns to lift poses from 2D to 3D using selfsupervision and adversarial learning techniques. The method does not use images, heatmaps, 3D pose annotations, paired/unpaired 2Dto3D skeletons, 3D priors, synthetic 2D skeletons, multiview or temporal information in any shape or form. The 2D skeleton input is taken by a VAE that encodes it in a latent space and then decodes that latent representation to a 3D pose. The 3D pose is then reprojected to 2D for a constrained, selfsupervised optimization using the input 2D pose. Parallelly, the 3D pose is also randomly rotated and reprojected to 2D to generate a ’novel’ 2D view for unconstrained adversarial optimization using a discriminator network. The combination of the optimizations of the original and the novel 2D views of the predicted 3D pose results in a ’realistic’ 3D pose generation. The thesis shows that the encoding and decoding process of the VAE addresses the major challenge of erroneous and incomplete skeletons from 2D detection networks as inputs and that the variance of the VAE can be altered to get various plausible 3D poses for a given 2D input. Additionally, the latent representation could be used for crossmodal training and many downstream applications. The results on Human3.6M datasets outperform previous unsupervised approaches with less model complexity while addressing more hurdles in scaling the task to the real world.