  In this paper, we propose an end-to-end trainable regression approach for
human pose estimation from still images. We use the proposed Soft-argmax
function to convert feature maps directly to joint coordinates, resulting in a
fully differentiable framework. Our method is able to learn heat maps
representations indirectly, without additional steps of artificial ground truth
generation. Consequently, contextual information can be included to the pose
predictions in a seamless way. We evaluated our method on two very challenging
datasets, the Leeds Sports Poses (LSP) and the MPII Human Pose datasets,
reaching the best performance among all the existing regression methods and
comparable results to the state-of-the-art detection based approaches.
