From Pose to Part: Weakly-Supervised Pose Evolution for Human Part Segmentation

Human part segmentation is a crucial but challenging task in computer vision. Recent works have achieved progress with the help of pixel-wise annotations. However, annotating pixel-wise masks especially at part-level is a tedious and labor-intensive procedure. To overcome this problem, we propose a part evolution framework to learn reliable predictions from weak pose annotations, which are much easier to collect. Our framework is composed of two essential modules: the first part adaptation module is designed to learn the deep prior knowledge from three related tasks, i.e., pose estimation, part-level and object-level segmentation; the second module is the part evolution module, which refines the part priors from deep predictions with the boundary-aware optimization algorithm. These two modules are conducted iteratively to evolve pose keypoint annotations into reliable part priors. Experimental evidence shows that our weakly-supervised approach generates comparable results with the state-of-the-art strongly-supervised methods on public benchmarks, and also validates the potential of notable improvements when combining weak labels with existing part segmentation masks.