  3D human articulated pose recovery from monocular image sequences is very
challenging due to the diverse appearances, viewpoints, occlusions, and also
the human 3D pose is inherently ambiguous from the monocular imagery. It is
thus critical to exploit rich spatial and temporal long-range dependencies
among body joints for accurate 3D pose sequence prediction. Existing approaches
usually manually design some elaborate prior terms and human body kinematic
constraints for capturing structures, which are often insufficient to exploit
all intrinsic structures and not scalable for all scenarios. In contrast, this
paper presents a Recurrent 3D Pose Sequence Machine(RPSM) to automatically
learn the image-dependent structural constraint and sequence-dependent temporal
context by using a multi-stage sequential refinement. At each stage, our RPSM
is composed of three modules to predict the 3D pose sequences based on the
previously learned 2D pose representations and 3D poses: (i) a 2D pose module
extracting the image-dependent pose representations, (ii) a 3D pose recurrent
module regressing 3D poses and (iii) a feature adaption module serving as a
bridge between module (i) and (ii) to enable the representation transformation
from 2D to 3D domain. These three modules are then assembled into a sequential
prediction framework to refine the predicted poses with multiple recurrent
stages. Extensive evaluations on the Human3.6M dataset and HumanEva-I dataset
show that our RPSM outperforms all state-of-the-art approaches for 3D pose
estimation.
