  Recent state-of-the-art performance on human-body pose estimation has been
achieved with Deep Convolutional Networks (ConvNets). Traditional ConvNet
architectures include pooling and sub-sampling layers which reduce
computational requirements, introduce invariance and prevent over-training.
These benefits of pooling come at the cost of reduced localization accuracy. We
introduce a novel architecture which includes an efficient `position
refinement' model that is trained to estimate the joint offset location within
a small region of the image. This refinement model is jointly trained in
cascade with a state-of-the-art ConvNet model to achieve improved accuracy in
human joint location estimation. We show that the variance of our detector
approaches the variance of human annotations on the FLIC dataset and
outperforms all existing approaches on the MPII-human-pose dataset.
