Tracking Human Pose Using Max-Margin Markov Models

We present a new method for tracking human pose by employing max-margin Markov models. Representing a human body by part-based models, such as pictorial structure, the problem of pose tracking can be modeled by a discrete Markov random field. Considering max-margin Markov networks provide an efficient way to deal with both structured data and strong generalization guarantees, it is thus natural to learn the model parameters using the max-margin technique. Since tracking human pose needs to couple limbs in adjacent frames, the model will introduce loops and will be intractable for learning and inference. Previous work has resorted to pose estimation methods, which discard temporal information by parsing frames individually. Alternatively, approximate inference strategies have been used, which can overfit to statistics of a particular data set. Thus, the performance and generalization of these methods are limited. In this paper, we approximate the full model by introducing an ensemble of two tree-structured sub-models, Markov networks for spatial parsing and Markov chains for temporal parsing. Both models can be trained jointly using the max-margin technique, and an iterative parsing process is proposed to achieve the ensemble inference. We apply our model on three challengeable data sets, which contains highly varied and articulated poses. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method over the state-of-the-art approaches.