Martial Arts, Dancing and Sports dataset: A challenging stereo and multi-view dataset for 3D human pose estimation

Human pose estimation is one of the most popular research topics in the past two decades, especially with the introduction of human pose datasets for benchmark evaluation. These datasets usually capture simple daily life actions. Here, we introduce a new dataset, the Martial Arts, Dancing and Sports (MADS), which consists of challenging martial arts actions (Tai-chi and Karate), dancing actions (hip-hop and jazz), and sports actions (basketball, volleyball, football, rugby, tennis and badminton). Two martial art masters, two dancers and an athlete performed these actions while being recorded with either multiple cameras or a stereo depth camera. In the multi-view or single-view setting, we provide three color views for 2D image-based human pose estimation algorithms. For depth-based human pose estimation, we provide stereo-based depth images from a single view. All videos have corresponding synchronized and calibrated ground-truth poses, which were captured using a Motion Capture system. We provide initial baseline results on our dataset using a variety of tracking frameworks, including a generative tracker based on the annealing particle filter and robust likelihood function, a discriminative tracker using twin Gaussian processes [1], and hybrid trackers, such as Personalized Depth Tracker [2]. The results of our evaluation suggest that discriminative approaches perform better than generative approaches when there are enough representative training samples, and that the generative methods are more robust to diversity of poses, but can fail to track when the motion is too quick for the effective search range of the particle filter. The data and the accompanying code will be made available to the research community.