Achieving Hard Real-Time Capability for 3D Human Pose Estimation Systems

Abstract

In the industrial domain, the application of any system as a safety function has to follow strict rules and requirements, defined in safety standards such as ISO 13849 [1] and ISO 13855 [2]. Two core requirements are an extremely low rate of dangerous errors and an upper limit for the response time of the system (hard real-time requirement). Current approaches in the field of human pose estimation achieve neither of both.In our work we approach the second requirement by introducing a general procedure to achieve hard real-time capability for interchangeable 3D human pose estimation systems. We use the detections of the pose estimation to model the human as 3D volume consisting of spheres and spherical cones. To bridge the time between arriving detections, the volume is adjusted in a way that ensures coherence, continuity and, most important, conformance with necessary surcharges from safety standard ISO 13855 [2]. Low and fixed computational cost for the adaption makes the procedure real-time capable. Our modelling approach using spheres and spherical cones also allows distance calculations at low and fixed computational costs, e.g. between human and robot. We show the benefit of our approach via human-robot distance calculation experiments, outperforming a safety-certified laser scanner for most of the time.