Probabilistic Triangulation for Uncalibrated Multi-View 3D Human Pose
  Estimation
Boyuan Jiang Lei Hu Shihong Xia
3D human pose estimation has been a long-standing challenge in computer
vision and graphics, where multi-view methods have significantly progressed but
are limited by the tedious calibration processes. Existing multi-view methods
are restricted to fixed camera pose and therefore lack generalization ability.
This paper presents a novel Probabilistic Triangulation module that can be
embedded in a calibrated 3D human pose estimation method, generalizing it to
uncalibration scenes. The key idea is to use a probability distribution to
model the camera pose and iteratively update the distribution from 2D features
instead of using camera pose. Specifically, We maintain a camera pose
distribution and then iteratively update this distribution by computing the
posterior probability of the camera pose through Monte Carlo sampling. This
way, the gradients can be directly back-propagated from the 3D pose estimation
to the 2D heatmap, enabling end-to-end training. Extensive experiments on
Human3.6M and CMU Panoptic demonstrate that our method outperforms other
uncalibration methods and achieves comparable results with state-of-the-art
calibration methods. Thus, our method achieves a trade-off between estimation
accuracy and generalizability. Our code is in
https://github.com/bymaths/probabilistic_triangulation