A Multi-view RGB-D Approach for Human Pose Estimation in Operating Rooms

Many approaches have been proposed for human pose estimation in single and multi-view RGB images. However, some environments, such as the operating room, are still very challenging for state-of-the-art RGB methods. In this paper, we propose an approach for multi-view 3D human pose estimation from RGB-D images and demonstrate the benefits of using the additional depth channel for pose refinement beyond its use for the generation of improved features. The proposed method permits the joint detection and estimation of the poses without knowing a priori the number of persons present in the scene. We evaluate this approach on a novel multi-view RGB-D dataset acquired during live surgeries and annotated with ground truth 3D poses.