A survey of human pose estimation: The body parts parsing based methods

•Summarization of methods on human pose estimation in recent years.•Conclusion of the traditional human pose estimation methods.•Illustrated based on a two-stage framework.•Comprehensive comparisons are given based on the open source methods.

Estimating human pose from videos and image sequences is not only an important computer vision problem, but also plays very critical role in many real-world applications. Main challenges for human pose estimation are variation of body poses, complicated background and depth ambiguities. To solve these problems, considerable research efforts have been devoted to the related fields. In this survey, we focus our attention on the recent advances in vision-based human pose estimation. We first present a general framework of human pose estimation, and then go through the latest technical progress on each stage. Finally, we discuss the limitations of the existing approaches and foresee the future directions to be explored.