  This paper presents an approach to parsing humans when there is significant
occlusion. We model humans using a graphical model which has a tree structure
building on recent work [32, 6] and exploit the connectivity prior that, even
in presence of occlusion, the visible nodes form a connected subtree of the
graphical model. We call each connected subtree a flexible composition of
object parts. This involves a novel method for learning occlusion cues. During
inference we need to search over a mixture of different flexible models. By
exploiting part sharing, we show that this inference can be done extremely
efficiently requiring only twice as many computations as searching for the
entire object (i.e., not modeling occlusion). We evaluate our model on the
standard benchmarked "We Are Family" Stickmen dataset and obtain significant
performance improvements over the best alternative algorithms.
