Real-Time Human Body Pose Estimation for In-Car Depth Images

Over the next years, the number of autonomous vehicles is expected to increase. This new paradigm will change the role of the driver inside the car, and so, for safety purposes, the continuous monitoring of the driver/passengers becomes essential. This monitoring can be achieved by detecting the human body pose inside the car to understand the driver/passenger's activity. In this paper, a method to accurately detect the human body pose on depth images acquired inside a car with a time-of-flight camera is proposed. The method consists in a deep learning strategy where the architecture of the convolutional neural network used is composed by three branches: the first branch is used to estimate the confidence maps for each joint position, the second one to associate different body parts, and the third branch to detect the presence of each joint in the image. The proposed framework was trained and tested in 8820 and 1650 depth images, respectively. The method showed to be accurate, achieving an average distance error between the detected joints and the ground truth of 7.6 pixels and an average accuracy, precision, and recall of 95.6%, 96.0%, and 97.8% respectively. Overall, these results demonstrate the robustness of the method and its potential for in-car body pose monitoring purposes.