PointSkelCNN: Deep Learning-Based 3D Human Skeleton Extraction from Point Clouds

Abstract

A 3D human skeleton plays important roles in human shape reconstruction and human animation. Remarkable advances have been achieved recently in 3D human skeleton estimation from color and depth images via a powerful deep convolutional neural network. However, applying deep learning frameworks to 3D human skeleton extraction from point clouds remains challenging because of the sparsity of point clouds and the high nonlinearity of human skeleton regression. In this study, we develop a deep learning-based approach for 3D human skeleton extraction from point clouds. We convert 3D human skeleton extraction into offset vector regression and human body segmentation via deep learning-based point cloud contraction. Furthermore, a disambiguation strategy is adopted to improve the robustness of joint points regression. Experiments on the public human pose dataset UBC3V and the human point cloud skeleton dataset 3DHumanSkeleton compiled by the authors show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.