  Human pose estimation and semantic part segmentation are two complementary
tasks in computer vision. In this paper, we propose to solve the two tasks
jointly for natural multi-person images, in which the estimated pose provides
object-level shape prior to regularize part segments while the part-level
segments constrain the variation of pose locations. Specifically, we first
train two fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs), namely Pose FCN and Part
FCN, to provide initial estimation of pose joint potential and semantic part
potential. Then, to refine pose joint location, the two types of potentials are
fused with a fully-connected conditional random field (FCRF), where a novel
segment-joint smoothness term is used to encourage semantic and spatial
consistency between parts and joints. To refine part segments, the refined pose
and the original part potential are integrated through a Part FCN, where the
skeleton feature from pose serves as additional regularization cues for part
segments. Finally, to reduce the complexity of the FCRF, we induce human
detection boxes and infer the graph inside each box, making the inference forty
times faster.
  Since there's no dataset that contains both part segments and pose labels, we
extend the PASCAL VOC part dataset with human pose joints and perform extensive
experiments to compare our method against several most recent strategies. We
show that on this dataset our algorithm surpasses competing methods by a large
margin in both tasks.
