MPII Human Pose Dataset -- pho…
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MPII Human Pose Dataset -- photos of human poses
bytescapes
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in The Commons
The Max Planck Institut fur Informatik has published a detailed dataset based on 25,000 annotated images of 40,000 people performing different activities, categorized by activity.
http://human-pose.mpi-inf.mpg.de/
The annotations describe the positions of joints and body parts.
Perhaps of interest to pose designers trying to make their poses as realistic as possible?
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Actually, I will be able to make good use of this although it would just be for my own renders. This will be a lovely reference when I am looking for something specific. Which happens often. Like, just last night lol!
Thanks for sharing!
"We are making the annotations and the corresponding code freely available for research purposes. If you would like to use the dataset for any other purposes please contact the authors."
Sounds like research to me... I mean I'm not sure what else you could use it for except as a reference for what a pose looks like. Unless you are doing photomanipulation and pulling the photos directly off the site and using them for something like that.
Well the restrictions I cited refers to the annotations and code which might be used for partly automating the pose creation process (I think).
As for creating poses based on the images is a grey area I think. What if someone created a commercial pose set from scratch based on the promos or renders from other commercial pose sets? Can you copyright a 3D pose at all?
I have created many poses from photos and drawn images of people. I am not sure how one can copywrite against such things because every PA gets ideas from stuff they see regardless of the type of content they make. Can you use someone elses promos as resources? Yes. But the real question is "Should you?" Copywrite the pose? Not sure how.
OK, for those who might have an interest in this material, I bit the bullet and decided to download the images out of curiousity. It is a fairly substantial download, since all the images are contained within a single archive file. It is approximately a 12 GB download. I'm close to the end of a billing cycle and have some spare bandwidth, so I said why not. I experienced an issue part way through, apart from the size of the download. My first attempt failed, with an interupted download. I hit resume and it seemed to complete, but when I attempted to extract the archive I got a couple of error messages. Nevertheless, the files did seemed to extract, and I was able to open a random selection of the .jpg images. That is when I noticed that the archive was only 3.4 GB. So, I decided to try downloading again. Once again, the download was interrupted and resuming merely indicated the download was completed at only 3.4 GB. So, I called it quits. I ended up with 7,256 of the images, enough to at least determine how useful they might be.
Headsup: The downloaded archive is a .gz (gzip) file, and extracting is not natively supported under Windows. You will need a third party utility such as 7zip, WinRAR, etc. to extract the contents.
The second download available, the Annotations file, is only really useful to those who have and use Matlab or equivalent for analysis purposes.
Unfortunately, upon extraction I discovered that the archive contained simply a huge number of uncategorized image files with numeric names. It was necessary to open each to see clearly what was represented. If one wished to use them as a guide to posing, it is a necessity to go through them all and place them into appropriate folders and subfolders by categories and subcategories to enable proper retrieval when needed. A lot of work given the number of images. Of course, they are not really intended for this purpose, so it is not an issue for those who have made them available.
After a perusal of some of the included images, here are my observations:
1. The images themselves, all .jpg format, vary greatly in quality, supposedly due to the varying quality of the source videos from which the screen grabs were made. Some are quite sharp, others pretty fuzzy. For the purpose of creating poses, I suppose the poorer ones can still be used as a guide though.
2. Some of the images illustrate poses fairly distinctly, but others less so, bearing in mind that the source videos were not necessarily intended for the purpose.
3. For some activities with which I am familiar, the poses presented are not necessarily representative. There are some poses common to those activities that should be there, but are not, and some of the poses in the images do not necessarily represent the best possible examples. Again, bearing in mind that the source videos were not necessarily intended for the purpose.
I am undecided about how useful these will be, and therefore whether I will wade through and categorize them all (at least the ones I have been able to get) and possibly delete those that I don't really need or want. It will be a lot of work.
There may be better sources of reference material.
I downloaded them too just to see what it was. I was surprised by the generally poor quality of the images considering the huge file sizes. Many look like they were taken with the camera in a cheap 15 year old mobile phone, or captured with a low quality TV card of the same age, from an analog source. In general this is not a very good source IMO, just zapping through different TV channels and capturing clips, or browsing pictures on google may be a better solution.
The interesting thing though is the annotations and code - like I said earlier it possibly might be used to generate basic poses automatically. But there may be a license problem here.