Dense Foot Pose Estimation From Images

Abstract: There is ongoing research into building dense correspondence between digital images of objects in the world and estimating the 3D pose of these objects. This is a difficult area to conduct research due to the lack of availability of annotated data. Annotating each pixel is too time-consuming. At the time of this writing, current research has managed to use neural networks to establish a dense pose estimation of human body parts (feet, chest, legs etc.). The aim of this thesis is to investigate if a model can be developed using neural networks to perform dense pose estimation on human feet. The data used in evaluating the model is generated using proprietary tools. Since this thesis is using a custom model and custom dataset, one model will be developed and tested with various experiments to gain an understanding of the different parameters that influence the model’s performance. Experiments showed that a model based on DeepLabV3 is able to achieve a dense pose estimation of feet with a mean error of 1.0cm. The limiting factor for a model’s ability to estimate a dense pose is based on the model’s ability to classify the pixels in an image accurately. It was also shown that discontinuous UV unwrapping greatly reduced the model’s dense pose estimation ability. The results from this thesis should be considered preliminary and need to be repeated multiple times to account for the stochastic nature of training neural networks.