  Exemplar-based models have achieved great success on localizing the parts of
semi-rigid objects. However, their efficacy on highly articulated objects such
as humans is yet to be explored. Inspired by hierarchical object representation
and recent application of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) on human
pose estimation, we propose a novel formulation that incorporates both
hierarchical exemplar-based models and DCNNs in the spatial terms.
Specifically, we obtain more expressive spatial models by assuming independence
between exemplars at different levels in the hierarchy; we also obtain stronger
spatial constraints by inferring the spatial relations between parts at the
same level. As our method strikes a good balance between expressiveness and
strength of spatial models, it is both effective and generalizable, achieving
state-of-the-art results on different benchmarks: Leeds Sports Dataset and
CUB-200-2011.
