Metric Regression Forests for Human Pose Estimation

We present a new method for inferring dense data to model correspondences, focusing on the application of human pose estimation from depth images. Recent work proposed the use of regression forests to quickly predict correspondences between depth pixels and points on a 3D human mesh model. That work, however, used a proxy forest training objective based on the classification of depth pixels to body parts. In contrast, we introduce Metric Space Information Gain (MSIG), a new decision forest training objective designed to directly optimize the entropy of distributions in a metric space. When applied to a model surface, viewed as a metric space defined by geodesic distances, MSIG aims to minimize image-to-model correspondence uncertainty. A naïve implementation of MSIG would scale quadratically with the number of training examples. As this is intractable for large datasets, we propose a method to compute MSIG in linear time. Our method is a principled generalization of the proxy classification objective, and does not require an extrinsic isometric embedding of the model surface in Euclidean space. Our experiments demonstrate that this leads to correspondences that are considerably more accurate than state of the art, using far fewer training images.