Occlusion-Aware Siamese Network for Human Pose Estimation

Pose estimation usually suffers from varying degrees of performance degeneration owing to occlusion. To conquer this dilemma, we propose an occlusion-aware siamese network to improve the performance. Specifically, we introduce scheme of feature erasing and reconstruction. Firstly, we utilize attention mechanism to predict the occlusion-aware attention map which is explicitly supervised and clean the feature map which is contaminated by different types of occlusions. Nevertheless, the cleaning procedure not only removes the useless information but also erases some valuable details. To overcome the defects caused by the erasing operation, we perform feature reconstruction to recover the information destroyed by occlusion and details lost in cleaning procedure. To make reconstructed features more precise and informative, we adopt siamese network equipped with OT divergence to guide the features of occluded images towards those of the un-occluded images. Algorithm is validated on MPII, LSP and COCO benchmarks and we achieve promising results.