  We propose a novel ConvNet model for predicting 2D human body poses in an
image. The model regresses a heatmap representation for each body keypoint, and
is able to learn and represent both the part appearances and the context of the
part configuration. We make the following three contributions: (i) an
architecture combining a feed forward module with a recurrent module, where the
recurrent module can be run iteratively to improve the performance, (ii) the
model can be trained end-to-end and from scratch, with auxiliary losses
incorporated to improve performance, (iii) we investigate whether keypoint
visibility can also be predicted. The model is evaluated on two benchmark
datasets. The result is a simple architecture that achieves performance on par
with the state of the art, but without the complexity of a graphical model
stage (or layers).
