View invariant body pose estimation based on biased manifold learning

In human body pose estimation, manifold learning is a popular technique for reducing the dimension of 2D images and 3D body configuration data. This technique, however, is especially vulnerable to silhouette variation such as caused by viewpoint changes. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that combines three separate manifolds for representing variations in viewpoint, pose and 3D body configuration. We use biased manifold learning to learn these manifolds with appropriately weighted distances. A set of four mapping functions are then learned by a generalized regression neural network for added robustness. Despite using only three manifolds, we show that this method can reliably estimate 3D body poses from 2D images with all learned viewpoints.