  In this paper, we propose to incorporate convolutional neural networks with a
multi-context attention mechanism into an end-to-end framework for human pose
estimation. We adopt stacked hourglass networks to generate attention maps from
features at multiple resolutions with various semantics. The Conditional Random
Field (CRF) is utilized to model the correlations among neighboring regions in
the attention map. We further combine the holistic attention model, which
focuses on the global consistency of the full human body, and the body part
attention model, which focuses on the detailed description for different body
parts. Hence our model has the ability to focus on different granularity from
local salient regions to global semantic-consistent spaces. Additionally, we
design novel Hourglass Residual Units (HRUs) to increase the receptive field of
the network. These units are extensions of residual units with a side branch
incorporating filters with larger receptive fields, hence features with various
scales are learned and combined within the HRUs. The effectiveness of the
proposed multi-context attention mechanism and the hourglass residual units is
evaluated on two widely used human pose estimation benchmarks. Our approach
outperforms all existing methods on both benchmarks over all the body parts.
