Three-Dimensional Human Pose Estimation from a Single Image Using Non-linear Convolutional Neural Network Based on Shape Information

3D human pose estimation is one of the most significant tasks in computer vision with wide range of applications. The works for estimating human pose initialized from 2D skeletal estimation from multiple data and has proceeded toward 3D skeletal estimation from minimum input information. In this paper, 3D human pose estimation from a single RGB image is investigated. The proposed work is considered as the ones which firstly estimate 2D pose and then lift the estimated 2D configuration to 3D space. Since most of the errors in this attitude are originated by inaccurate 2D pose inference, we have proposed a method for predicting more accurate 2D poses to obtain 3D poses with less errors. The proposed approach for estimating 2D pose has leveraged deep learning along with the information of the edge map. In other words, we have made use of edge features, which are hand-designed features, in order to guide the deep neural network in training and in learning the features in accordance with the defined objective. Experimental results have demonstrated less errors in 2D and consequently 3D pose estimation in Human3.6M and HumanEva-I benchmarks.