  We present the first real-time method to capture the full global 3D skeletal
pose of a human in a stable, temporally consistent manner using a single RGB
camera. Our method combines a new convolutional neural network (CNN) based pose
regressor with kinematic skeleton fitting. Our novel fully-convolutional pose
formulation regresses 2D and 3D joint positions jointly in real time and does
not require tightly cropped input frames. A real-time kinematic skeleton
fitting method uses the CNN output to yield temporally stable 3D global pose
reconstructions on the basis of a coherent kinematic skeleton. This makes our
approach the first monocular RGB method usable in real-time applications such
as 3D character control---thus far, the only monocular methods for such
applications employed specialized RGB-D cameras. Our method's accuracy is
quantitatively on par with the best offline 3D monocular RGB pose estimation
methods. Our results are qualitatively comparable to, and sometimes better
than, results from monocular RGB-D approaches, such as the Kinect. However, we
show that our approach is more broadly applicable than RGB-D solutions, i.e. it
works for outdoor scenes, community videos, and low quality commodity RGB
cameras.
