  In this paper, we address the problem of estimating the positions of human
joints, i.e., articulated pose estimation. Recent state-of-the-art solutions
model two key issues, joint detection and spatial configuration refinement,
together using convolutional neural networks. Our work mainly focuses on
spatial configuration refinement by reducing variations of human poses
statistically, which is motivated by the observation that the scattered
distribution of the relative locations of joints e.g., the left wrist is
distributed nearly uniformly in a circular area around the left shoulder) makes
the learning of convolutional spatial models hard. We present a two-stage
normalization scheme, human body normalization and limb normalization, to make
the distribution of the relative joint locations compact, resulting in easier
learning of convolutional spatial models and more accurate pose estimation. In
addition, our empirical results show that incorporating multi-scale supervision
and multi-scale fusion into the joint detection network is beneficial.
Experiment results demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms
state-of-the-art methods on the benchmarks.
